The Restless Ape

The Restless Ape

Billy Bryson

Lisa Williams

Ancient humans shaped rocks into tools they could use. The surprising result is that a bunch of tools have been found on the west side of the planet, but none on the east side. Early humans traveled to the east, but apparently they left their tools on the west side for a reason that we don't know. Ancient bones were found in Australia. This means early humans had to cross water in an effective way in order to get here, and they had to take enough people to keep breeding. It is said that there were two waves of people that left Africa. 
Neandertals were a tough species of early humans that somehow disappeared from the planet. It is believed that they co-existed with modern humans for some time. Cro-Magnons, or early Europeans, are thought to be the reason for driving them into extinction. Neandertals were tough and resistant, but their average age was only about thirty
.Mitochondrial DNA was started being used in order to expand our knowledge on the connection between modern humans and ancient humans. In 1997, it was found that Neandertal DNA was nothing similar to modern human DNA.

Bill Bryson - The Mysterious Biped

Chapter 28, The Mysterious Biped Summary.

Biped:  noun

1. an animal that uses two legs for walking.

In 1887 an anatomist Marie Eugene Francois Thomas Dubois set out to Sumatra, In the Dutch East Indies, with the intention of finding the earliest human remains on earth, At this time no one had ever purposefully set out to find ancient human bones and all bones had been found accidentally.

Around the time of Dubois' assignment in Sumatra, Workmen in a quarry found curious looking bones and gave them to a schoolteacher, Johann Karl Fuhlrott, who was interested and he discovered they were some kind of human. Many people refused to believe that they were ancient neanderthal bones, insisting the bones came from wounded soldiers who fought in Germany 1814. Throughout many different years scientists found different evidence of bones from the neanderthal that showed the evolution of apes to humans, and agreed that at that time it was at least 15 million years ago that apes split to humans which is why the ancient bones these scientists found looked different to the modern humans, some looking more apelike and some looking more humanlike. Through time scientists could see various differences in the bones which showed the species evolving as they had once lived in the forests and with the ice age were forced to leave to savannas where they adapted to stand up right like we do know. Scientists also found new species of bones further back than the neanderthal which they called homo erectus they were thought to have dated back at least 7 million years.