Being that the vegetarian Boise was a culdesac,and the predatorial Habilus is more our descendant?

Question

How do you think the marrow munching Homo Habilus may be reflecting in one another's behavior patterns today? ...Do you observe any unmitigated vitriolic behaviours in your fellow humans that may have their origin in our small in stature but fierce in disposition Habilus ancestor?

I am not a spelling diletante ...perhaps it's the monkey in me ...somehow tho I manage to get my points across ...

Answer 1

Homo Habilus was indeed our ancestor. And we owe him a lot.
To discount A. Boisei (note the correct spelling) though Is a mistake.

Answer 2

I've never bought into the Desmond Morris theory of man as a barely repressed savage, struggling to contain himself from wrestling with cave bears and clubbing women on the head and dragging them back to his cave.

I'm much more convinced by the Richard Leakey view. Where the Australopithecines retain the competitive dimorphism of chimps, sexual dimorphism shrinks in human fossils, such that by the time of Homo Erectus, the difference in height and size between men and women is in the modern range. This only happens in animals when agressive competition for mates leaves the picture.

Also that the increasingly complex behaviours of the human line - hunting, tool making - required an increasingly cooperative culture of collaboration, with complex long range hunting, and people teaching each other stone working. Erectus was even making rafts to cross the Ocean to Flores 750,000 years ago. This indicates that language is ancient - and what is language if not an attempt by evolution to bind the members of the species more closely with one another, and mediate conflict?

Hunting species are not always vicious (the social interplay of wolves is a good example) and vegetarian species are not always well mannered (the hippo kills more people in its range than any other creature.) The most meat-oriented societies on Earth today - such as the Inuit - are among the most peaceful.

Leakey speculates that war began in our species when settlement and property began - not really before. Prior to that, prehistory mostly paints us a picture of deep cooperation.

Answer 3

Scientists currently believe Homo habilis was not an ancestor of modern man.

"Homo habilis was originally thought to be the ancestor to all later Homo. In a neat, linear progression, later species emerged resulting in what we call modern humans. This is now known not to be the case." http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/hab.html

"Bromage points out that the first reconstruction of ER 1470 was erroneous by giving it a flat face, but - '… recent studies of anatomical relationships show that in life the face must have jutted out considerably, creating an ape-like aspect, rather like the faces of Australopithecus'.72 This finding is one of a number which suggest that the species Homo habilis never existed. In reality all 'habiline' forms display unmistakable australopithecine traits." http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v8/i1/erectus.asp

The ancestors of modern man is still a hotly debated area in paleoanthropology

Answer 4

Cool! ...diletantes of anthropology actually debating moot points of Evolution!