years ago, according to the most recent discoveries, two early primates (Toumai in Chad and Orrorin in Kenya) climb down from the trees — doubtless after a drought — and stand upright on their two legs. Two million years later, another genus of primate, Australopithecus , also comes down from the trees to walk the landscapes of eastern and southern Africa. Three million years later, in the same region, certain of its descendants, Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis , creatures selected by the demands of bipedal movement, adopt a more upright posture, and can thereforesupport a heavier brain. Gatherers, scavengers, and parasites, they learn to chip stones for use as tools, and begin their walk from territory to territory across the African continent.
The only survivors are the primates best adapted to wandering; the only progress comes through hunter-gatherer techniques compatible with movement.
A million and a half years ago, still in East Africa and shoulder to shoulder with primate species already in existence, Homo ergaster appears. He is even better adapted than the others to long journeys. Still somewhat stooped in stance, he is shaped by movement: he loses his fur and he can run. He even seems to have acquired the rudiments of speech.
A million years later a descendant of Homo ergaster evolves and gives birth to another species of primate: the very first to leave East Africa. In the space of a few dozen millennia, he explores the rest of Africa, Europe, Central Asia, India, Indonesia, and China.
A hundred thousand years later, two other primates are born (most likely still in Africa) — Homo sapiens and Homo heidelbergensis , still nomadic, and even better adapted for walking than their predecessors. They hold themselves more upright, they possess larger brains, and they boast greater sophistication in language. Their only tools are still chipped flint. Utterly at the mercy of the forces of nature, of rain, wind, and thunder, they see in those phenomena the manifestation of superior powers. They do not yet bury their dead, but their still precarious dwellings become stronger. All these primates — neighbors but not kin — coexist without interbreeding.Unlike any other animal species, they begin to transmit knowledge from generation to generation. Lesson for the future: transmission is a condition of progress.
Around 700,000 years before our era, in China and Africa, Homo sapiens masters the lightning and learns how to make fire. He is now capable of cooking vegetables, thus providing better nourishment for his brain. He also realizes that he can summon certain natural forces to his service. This is a considerable leap. He devises the first footwear, sews man’s first garments, and penetrates Europe, that cold, forest-shrouded continent.
The lineage of Homo sapiens splits into several branches. One of them evolves into Homo neandertalis . Around 300,000 years ago, he roams across Africa, Europe, and Asia. For the first time, he builds sophisticated huts wherever he goes, and he buries his dead. In Europe, still cut off by Alpine and Baltic glaciers, Neanderthals coexist with the other primates, neither mingling with nor replacing them.
It was doubtless at this time (300,000 years ago) that cannibalism began, not as an act of violence but as a ritual appropriation of the strength of the dead. Even today, we detect its vestiges in the human relationship with all levels of consumption. Homo sapiens also discovers that procreation is a consequence of the sex act, and that both partners have a role to play. The status of the sexes is now more clearly defined. Males live together, never changing tribes. Women, on the other hand — perhaps to avoid the incest that might weaken the group — leave the tribe at puberty, or at least distance themselves from it in order to have a space of theirown, perhaps inside the tribal territory. Sexuality and reproduction start to be viewed separately, and a baleful historical