Homo sapiens, humans with brains like ours, have been around for about 200,000 years.
Various members of the genus Homo have been around for 2 to 3 million years.
Another genus in the ape family, the Australopithecines, has been around for 4 million years. Its most famous archaeological remain is Lucy, a member of Australopithecus afarensis, found in 1974 in Ethiopia.
The cover article in the October 2015 issue of National Geographic Magazine discusses new findings in a cave thirty miles northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa, the Rising Star Cave.
In this cave are remains of at least 15 individuals from infant to elderly and both genders. They seem to have been dropped in the furthest part of the cave as a kind of burial or protection.
Fascinating, when you consider that these remains have brains less than half the size of ours. They are 560 cu cm for the males, 465 for the females--nowhere near Homo erectus at 900 cu cm. Our brains are nearly 1500 cu cm.
"The message we're getting is of an animal right on the cusp of the transition from Australopithecus to Homo," reports Lee Berger, the paleontologist at Witwatersrand University who has been studying them.
This article is the most interesting I have read in years.
I want to know more about these ape-like humans, possibly a missing link in our human development.
Were they indeed protecting the bodies of their dead relatives?
What were they thinking?
What were their family relationships like? What did they eat? Where did they live?
"It's an animal that appears to have had the cognitive ability to recognize its separation from nature," says Berger.
In other words, unlike my dogs, it may have understood that death would come. It may have thought about its place in the world--"Why am I here?"
It may have had goals other than food and shelter and reproduction.
Did it think, "Who created all this? Is there another Being, larger than we are?"
I am fascinated by this evidence of early human-like behaviors in a being not yet Homo sapiens.
I want to know God's thoughts about these creatures. For 2-3 million years, they were the most interesting creatures on Earth, perhaps God's pride and joy.
These questions bring to mind Bethany Sollereder's article "The Purpose of Dinosaurs: Extinction and the Goodness of God" in Christian Century, Oct. 2, 2013 (vol. 130, no. 20).
"Thug God's providential action is twofold," she concludes. "Each individual creature and species is an end in itself, existing for the glory and delight of God in that moment; and the disparate story lines of all beings that exist or have existed are wound unto the epic tale of earth's history."
