Primate Origins
Man = Gorilla + Chimpanzee?

As noted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
"in both East and southern Africa
the gracile australopithecines antedate the robust australopithecines
...the emergence of the robust australopithecines
at the East African sites seems to coincide
with the appearance of the so-called advanced gracile hominids
attributed to homo habilis."

In the National Geographhic of August 1998 there is an article
on the "The Dawn of Humans: Redrawing Our Family Tree"
by Lee Berger in which he suggests that the conventional view
of a straight line evolution from an ancestral hominid to
Australopithecus afarensis to Homo Habilis with a branch out
to Homo erectus and Homo Sapiens is wrong, and that
Australopithecus africanus represents a separate line, thinking,
however, incorrectly that "afarensis and africanus are sister
species that share a missing-link ancestor"- so that, to quote
Berger, "only one could have been ancestral to humans".

Berger's is correct in challenging the conventional view,
but he chooses the wrong interpretation of his own facts.

Berger himself notes that africanus has "limbs that were more chimplike",
with emphasis on the CHIMP, so that africanus clearly goes back to the
chimps. Afarensis, the robust one, on the other hand, compares to the
GORILLA, with shorter arms and longer legs.

Could the two have merged by inter-mating to form what later became
homo sapiens, i.e. mankind. This is supported by the fact that
Homo habilis appears primarily in that African region where the
geographic TERRITORIAL borders of these two apes MEET in Africa.

The "milder" approach is to say that two man-like developments
from the apes developed along separate lines and then mated.
The Neanderthal-type primate would be more Gorilla-like, the
Cro-Magnon type would be more Chimp-like or Bonobo-type.
If they had intermated at some point in time, this would account
for the two major types of humans and the variations inbetween.

The tough question is ... who are the ancestors of the apes?
I personally think it might be cats that took to the trees
and later through evolution came back down again as monkeys.