Jungles of Dahng — Nazir Brelvi

General Synopsis of the five-part Adventure Series From the very beginning, over four million years ago, the fossil record reveals that the flow of hominid evolution has always been episodic rather than gradual. Due to some unpredictable perturbations in the global climate, during the late Pliocene, the African landmass witnessed a dramatic shrinkage of habitable woodlands, which induced the early humans living there to adapt or face extinction. The record shows that they not only succeeded but also flourished, by displaying true innovation, superior cognitive skills and an imaginative manipulation of their habitat. Our remotest ancestors were essentially neither apes nor human but possessed physical adaptations that are unfortunately no longer found in any primate species living today. They were neither as talented in the trees as the great apes nor as facile on terra firma as us humans. But.as the evolution of the human lineage clearly shows through mounting fossil evidence, there are many ways to be a hominid and that our way is just one of them. As pointed out earlier, the hominid evolutionary history has not been one of gradual continuous improvement but quite sporadic at best throughout the past four million years. In fact, all of us modern Homo sapiens, for all our remarkable capacities, represent just one of the many twigs on the prickly bush of hominid evolution. We are definitely not the sole occupants of a pedestal, which all other primates have aspired to but failed to reach.