Is our ancestor a bipedal?

Soviet school education represented human anthropogenesis, trying to "fit" it to the materialistic theory: monkey, Pithecanthropus, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. University science did not differ from the school, it simply added Latin terms: Hominids, Homo habilis, Homo erectus (Pithecanthropus, most of the life moving on two legs), Homo sapiens (Neanderthals, who have the first religious beliefs) And Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon, completely analogous to the structure of the body and the brain volume of modern humans). It is believed that, beginning with the Cro-Magnon man, the evolutionary development of man as a biological being has stopped.

Such a simplified view of the origin of the human race suggested that the three main stages (Pithecanthropus, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon) successively succeeded each other, at some point, in an abrupt evolution and transformation. So, Marxist theory explained that Homo habilis (that is, Skillful) needed free hands to make tools, so he became upright and evolved into Homo erectus. And the explanation of the appearance of a rational man was explained by the need to improve hunting tools. Thus, all three kinds of ancient people were considered the stages of the development of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, namely, our direct ancestors.

However, the remains found and the carbon analysis that determines their age break this theory. For example, the skeletons of Australopithecus, Homo habilis and erectus date back to one century. Also, fossils indicate that a straight man, a Neanderthal man and a Cro-Magnon were contemporaries and coexisted in some places side by side. This allows scientists to suggest that Homo erectus was simply a dead-end branch in evolution, and homo sapiens appeared from nowhere. The "missing link" in evolution feeds on theories about the divine or cosmic origin of man.

Who is he, this straight man? For the first time his remains were discovered in Java in 1893, at the same time they named him Pithecanthropus. Then in China, in 1920, the owner of the ancient skeleton was called Sinanthropus - the Chinese representative of this species. Later, the scientists decided that between the Chinese, Javanese and the skeletons found in 1985 in Narikotom (East Africa), there were many similarities, and combined them into a group of "upright" or "archanthropes".

It is believed that it first appeared 1 million 650 thousand years ago in Africa. For two hundred thousand years, he settled over the vast expanses of Eurasia, reached the Great Sunda Islands, in particular, Java. A person who is bony in comparison with the Skilled, demonstrates a huge, truly revolutionary leap in development. He could use fire, make primitive dwellings and clothes. But the main thing, what distinguished the ancient upright people from their predecessors (or contemporaries), so this is because they became hunters. The Skilled Man was a scavenger. His tools were intended for splitting the bones of the dead or killed by other carnivores. It was mostly pebbles (Olduvai pebble culture), which was simply split, and the bone marrow was sharp-edged.

The Acheulian type of culture that the straight-bodied man created is a complex stone tool that requires spatial thinking and certain skills that are passed from master to disciple. Studies of skulls show that Homo erectus had a brain twice as large as Skilful, but less than Neanderthal. His height was one and a half meters, sometimes a meter 80 cm, and the weight ranged from 40 to 70 kilograms. Since the Pithecanthropus hunted, and hunted together, we can assume the rudiments of verbal speech, although they do not have a chin.

Was the person erect in a special way, or simply a "race"? Could he interbreed and give a common offspring with Homo habilis or Neanderthal? So far, there are no such remains that combine the features of these three races or species. Somehow, these intelligent beings did not survive the Great Glaciation. Already 20 thousand years ago both Pithecanthropus and Neanderthals left the historical arena. When the glacier receded, only one species of people remained on Earth - Homo sapiens sapiens.