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Some australopithecines appear to have started making stone tools by 2.6
million years ago, and by 2.4 million years ago, one group of them seems to have
evolved into the first human, rather than merely human-like, creatures--a
new genus called Homo which had a larger brain and more human body proportions.
By around two million years ago, a species of Homo with a more
human-like gait, called Homo ergaster (an early form of the better-known species Homo erectus) emerged, and some of the members of this species left Africa and by 1.8 million years ago had arrived in what is now the Republic of Georgia.
Those members of the Homo ergaster/Homo erectus species who stayed in Africa ultimately evolved by 150,000 years ago, through an intermediate type called Homo heidelbergensis by some paleoanthropologists, into us, Homo sapiens, and the Neandertals, our evolutionary siblings who flourished in Europe and parts of Asia before probably becoming extinct around 25,000-30,000 years ago.
H. erectus persisted in Asia and was presumably the parent stock of H. floresiensis.
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© 2004 by the Archaeological Institute of America
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