Early Man in East Africa

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Abstract
Recent discoveries of early Pleistocene hominids in East Africa have revealed a new stage in human evolution. The remains of Homo habilis, discovered by L.S.B. Leakey and his family, bridge the hiatus between the most advanced australopithecines and the most primitive hominines. The new species was bigger-brained and smaller-toothed than Australopithecus, the fossil apeman from South and East Africa. It is very probable that Homo habilis was, as his name implies, a "handyman", maker of the earliest stone culture, the Oldowan. The closeness of morphology between H. habilis and Australopithecus africanus points strongly to a common ancestry in the Upper Pliocene or the very beginning of the Pleistocene. The large-toothed A. robustus and A. boisei were already diverging by specialization from the postulated unspecialized ancestral australopithecine. Later, some populations of H. habilis seemingly underwent further hominizing changes to generate a new species Homo erectus. Homo habilis thus fills in the last remaining major gap in the Pleistocene story of human evolution.