Multimedia Collection
First Born & Body
(Dawn of Man: The Story of Human Evolution series)
VHS
100 minutes
GN281.4 .D391 2000 v.1
First Born
The starting point of the age-old mystery of how the human journey began was the remarkable discovery of the skull of a child who died 2.5 million years ago. Scientists deduced that the child's brain was connected to its spine rather than to the rear as in the apes, and so he must have walked upright. It is amazing that these first hominids, or members of the human-family - with a brain only slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee - walked on two feet and lived in family groups like our own.
Body
In the dusty scrub of northern Kenya, a perfectly preserved skeleton was found of a boy who had died 1.4 million years earlier: Homo erectus. The missing link was not what scientists had been expecting. Homo erectus was not a hairy ape with a human face: quite the opposite. He looked like us, but had the mental ability of a modern one-year-old. This walking hominid had evolved into a super-predator.
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