must have disappeared by then also. As for why Homo erectus survived and the robust man-ape didn't, we can only speculate. A plausible guess is that the robust man-ape could no longer compete, since Homo erectus ate both meat and plant food, and since tools and a larger brain made Homo erectus more efficient at getting even the plant food on which his robust sibling depended. It is also possible that Homo erectus gave his sibling a direct push into oblivion, by killing him for meat.
THE HUMAN FAMILY TREE 
Several branches of our family tree have become extinct, including those belonging to the robust australopithecines, Neanderthals, and possibly a poorly understood 'Third Man' and an Asian population contemporary with Neanderthals. Some descendants of Homo habilis survived to evolve into modern humans. To recognize by different names the changes in fossils representing this line, they are somewhat arbitrarily divided into Homo habilis, then Homo erectus appearing about 1.7 million years ago, and Homo sapiens appearing about 500,000 years ago. A. stands for the genus name of Australopithecus, H. for Homo.
All the developments that I have been discussing so far were played out within the continent of Africa, to which our closest living relatives (the chimps and gorilla) are still confined. The shakedown had left Homo erectus as the sole proto-human on the African stage. Around one million years ago Homo erectus expanded his horizons. His stone tools and bones show that he reached the Near East, then the Far East (where he is represented by the famous fossils known as Peking Man and Java Man) and Europe. He continued to evolve in our direction by an increase in brain size and in skull roundness. By around 500,000 years ago, some of our ancestors looked sufficiently like us, and different enough from earlier Homo erectus, to be classified as our own species (Homo sapiens, meaning 'the wise man'), though they still had thicker skulls and brow ridges than we do today.
Readers unfamiliar with details of our evolution might be forgiven for assuming that the appearance of Homo sapiens constituted the Great Leap Forward. Was our meteoric ascent to sapiens status half-a-million years ago the brilliant climax of Earth's history, when art and sophisticated technology finally burst upon our previously dull planet? Not at all: the appearance of Homo sapiens was a non-event. Cave paintings, houses, and bows and arrows still lay hundreds of thousands of years off in the future. Stone tools continued to be the crude ones that Homo erectus had been making for nearly a million years. The extra brain size of those early Homo sapiens had no dramatic effect on our way of life. That whole long tenure of Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens outside Africa was a period of infinitesimally slow cultural change. In fact, the sole candidate for a major advance was possibly the control of fire, of which caves occupied by Peking Man provide one of the earliest indications in the form of ash, charcoal, and burnt bones. Even that advance—if those cave fires really were man-lit rather than natural—would belong to Homo erectus, not Homo sapiens.
Thus, the emergence of Homo sapiens illustrates the paradox discussed in Chapter One, that our rise to humanity was not directly proportional to the changes in our genes. Early Homo sapiens had progressed much further in anatomy than in cultural attainments along the road up from chimpanzeehood. Some crucial ingredients still had to be added before the Third Chimpanzee could conceive of painting the Sistine Chapel.
How did our ancestors make their living during the one-and-a-half million years that spanned the emergence of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens'?
The only surviving tools from this period are stone tools that can charitably be described as very crude, in comparison with the beautiful, polished stone tools made until recently by Polynesians, American Indians, and other modern stone-age peoples. Early stone tools vary in size and shape, and archaeologists have used those differences to give the tools different names, such as 'hand-axe', 'chopper', and 'cleaver'. These names conceal the fact that none of those early tools had a sufficiently consistent or distinctive shape to suggest any specific function, as do the obvious needles and spear-points left by the much later Cro-Magnons. Wear-marks on the tools show that they were variously used to cut meat, bone, hides, wood, and non-woody parts of plants, but any size or shape of tool seems to have been used to cut any of those things, and the tool names applied by archaeologists may be little more than arbitrary divisions of a continuum of stone forms.
Negative evidence is also significant here. Many advances in tools that appear after the Great Leap Forward were unknown to Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens. There were no bone tools, no ropes to make nets, and no fishhooks. All the early stone tools may have been held directly in the hand; they show no signs of being mounted on other materials for increased leverage, as we mount steel axe-blades on wooden handles.
What food did our early ancestors get with those crude tools, and how did they get it? At this point, anthropology textbooks usually insert a long chapter entitled something like 'Man the Hunter'. The point here is that baboons, chimps, and some other primates occasionally prey on small vertebrates, but recently surviving stone- age people (like Bushmen) did a lot of big-game hunting. So did Cro-Magnons, according to abundant archaeological evidence. There is no doubt that our early ancestors also ate some meat, as shown by marks of their stone tools on animal bones and by wear-marks on their stone tools caused by cutting meat. The real question is: how much big-game hunting did our early ancestors do? Did big-game hunting skills improve gradually over the past one-and-a-half million years, or was it only since the Great Leap Forward that they made a large contribution to our diet?
Anthropologists routinely reply that we have been successful big-game hunters for a long time. The supposed evidence comes mainly from three archaeological sites occupied around 500,000 years ago: a cave at Zhoukoudian near Beijing, containing bones and tools of Homo erectus ('Peking Man') and bones of many animals; and two non-cave (open-air) sites at Torralba and Ambrona in Spain, with stone tools and bones of elephants and other large animals. It is usually assumed that the people who left the tools killed the animals, brought their carcasses to the site, and ate them there, but all three sites also have bones and faecal remains of hyenas, which could equally well have been the hunters. The bones of the Spanish sites in particular look like they came from a collection of scavenged, water-washed, trampled carcasses such as one can find around African water-holes today, rather than from a human hunters' camp. Thus, while early humans ate some meat, we do not know how much meat they ate, nor whether they got the meat by hunting or scavenging. It is not until much later, around 100,000 years ago, that we have good evidence about human hunting skills, and it is clear that humans then were still very ineffective big-game hunters. Human hunters of 500,000 years ago and earlier must have been even more ineffective.
The mystique of Man the Hunter is now so rooted in us that it is hard to abandon our belief in its long- standing importance. Today, shooting a big animal is regarded as an ultimate expression of macho masculinity. Trapped in this mystique, male anthropologists like to stress the key role of big-game hunting in human evolution. Supposedly, big-game hunting was what induced proto-human males to cooperate with each other, develop language and big brains, join into bands, and share food. Even women were supposedly moulded by men's big- game hunting: women suppressed the external signs of monthly ovulation that are so conspicuous in chimps, so as not to drive men into a frenzy of sexual competition and thereby spoil men's cooperation at hunting. As an example of the purple prose spawned by this men's locker-room mentality, consider the following account of human evolution by Robert Ardrey in his book African Genesis: In some scrawny troop of beleagured not-yet-men on some scrawny forgotten plain a radian particle from an unknown source fractured a never-to-be-forgotten gene, and a primate carnivore was born. For better or worse, for tragedy or for triumph, for ultimate glory or ultimate damnation, intelligence made alliance with the way of the killer, and Cain with his sticks and his stones and his quickly running feet emerged on the high savannah. What pure fantasy!
Western male writers and anthropologists are not the only men with an exaggerated view of hunting. In New Guinea I have lived with real hunters, men who recently emerged from the Stone Age. Conversations at campfires go on for hours over each species of game animal, its habits, and how best to hunt it. To listen to my
