When Homo sapiens emerged as a species, he was not alone. The world he entered was already peopled by giants and dwarfs, elves, trolls and pixies-in other words, creatures that looked humanlike, but were not the genuine article. Or, at least, not as genuine as Homo sapiens has come to believe himself to be. Like the story of Homo sapiens himself, the story of the whole human family begins in Africa. About 4.5m years ago, probably in response to a drying of the climate that caused forest cover in that continent to shrink, one species of great ape found itself pushed out into the savannah, an ecological niche not normally occupied by apes. Over the next 300,000 years these apes evolved an upright stance.
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