astro picture of the day/ Dr Leakey and the Dawn of Man (1966)

Image credit - Mars Express

This post was originally just about the Louis Leakey video below.  But, I found this documentary above, which is the best I've seen of Raymond Dart's discovery of Australopithacines.

Charles Darwin suggested Africa as the place to look for human origins.  But, most people looked to Asia.  Raymond Dart ended up in South Africa by a quirk of academic politics. Raymond found Taung child - the first Australopithacine ever discovered. Donald Johanson would become famous much later for discovering the oldest Australopithacine - Lucy.

The Raymond Dart story is interesting for other scientific society reasons. An English scientific society that was biased towards England. They wanted England to be the center of mankind.  Someone fabricated a Piltdown man.

After Raymond Dart, came the story of Louise Leakey, which the classic documentary below covers,

I remember seeing this in my youth - possibly pre-puberty.  I remember a scene with a shadowy figure running down a slope at night.  And, I remember a Robustus face reconstruction.


The twentieth century is of course going to be famous for elucidating the nature of the atom, the Big Bang Cosmology and more I can't list.  But, we also established mankind as originating in Africa(recently, we may have pushed it to lower Europe.  Well, what probably happened was some Homo Erectus came down from southern Europe and then evolved into Homo Sapiens, possibly in modern day Morrocco.)


Most people today just know that Louis Leakey found some bipedal primates in Oldovia gorge.  But, as even this 1966 National Geographic video shows, Louis Leakey first discovered stone tools. The tools pointed to some stone tool maker. There had to be some fossils of the "tool-maker".  Louis Leakey of course found it.

The Australopithacines likely started out eating fruits, nuts and vegetables.  But, with stone tools, they started carving out the marrow of bones left over from the killings of larger and faster species. The larger stronger, and faster species might get to the prey faster; but, they couldn't get into the marrow of the bones. This was 1) the initial niche Australopithacines found, and 2) a path towards eating meat and getting bigger themselves. They would evolve into the Homo Erectus, which was the first lifeform to populate the entire Earth.  To not be bound to one habitat, and to use fire.

It's one thing to find some bipedal primate, it's another to find that it is a stone tool maker, millions of years ago. A lifeform was technologically dependent for millions of years before it created art, language, and mathematics. Art and Language seems to go a few tens of thousands of years ago.

A recent article suggests exactly what I suggest, even in my Gospel of Truth, that art was pre-language -- > Ancient cave art may be origin of modern language Well, this article suggests something about echoes and picture placement.  I don't go that far.