What is Homo Habilis?

@kentuckycat - You are right. Homo habilis was much shorter than average modern humans. Only about 4 feet tall. As far as what has been learned in the most recent years, I'm not completely sure about that. I do know there are quite a few intermediate species that are rarely mentioned in high school classes. Unless you're involved in anthropology courses, they are very rarely mentioned in books.

I think the main species people hear about - Homo habilis, erectus, and sapien - are common because they were around the longest and have the best fossil records.

When I was taking my anthropology class, what I thought was really interesting was that there was actually another genus called Paranthropus that was around while they Homo genus was evolving. They had the same Homo habilis features such as ape-like faces and appendages. Unfortunately, they did not develop the use of tools as quickly and efficiently as the Homo genus and they eventually went extinct.

@Izzy78 - As I understand it, Homo neanderthalensis would have come right before Homo sapiens if they coexisted together.

I realized reading this article that a whole lot has changed in the way that we understand human evolution just in the years that I took these types of classes in high school. I don't think we ever even mentioned Homo ergaster when discussing the species. Is this a relatively new finding, or just something that got left out of the mix?

I always think it is interesting reading about how these other people compared to current humans. The article talks about the brain size and facial shape, but about what was the Homo habilis height? I would expect them to probably be shorter than current humans, especially since I think most scientists agree that the average human height is still increasing.

@titans62 - Based on that point, does brain size directly equate to intelligence? If I remember correctly, weren't the skulls of Neanderthals much larger than our current skulls, but they were obviously not as mentally sophisticated? I could very well be wrong about that, though. I was never very good at those anthropology types of classes. Also the article says that Homo habilis had half of our current brain capacity. Does that mean that the Homo habilis skull was half the size, or they could just remember half of what we currently can?

Could someone also clear up for me the exact order that all of these earlier humanoid species arrived? If I understand correctly, there were the Australopithecus genus first. After that, the Homo species evolved. Those went habilis, ergaster, erectus, then sapien? Where does Homo neanderthalensis fit into the mix, then?

@jholcomb - That is interesting about what the early scientists thought. Maybe I am just biased because I do know what the order actually was, but just thinking about it, I would have guessed that we would have become more advanced physically before we developed larger brains.

I think that is the typical order that most animals follow. The first key to survival is just that - survival. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you can't escape danger. Even the most basic animals understand (in some sense) that avoiding death is key.

The early Homo habilis people wouldn't have been any different. Once they used their relatively small brains to learn how to avoid getting eaten by other animals and how to make weapons to kill those animals, then they could start thinking more about other things. I guess that would have been what eventually caused them to develop larger brain capacity.

I've read that early scientists thought that large brains would have evolved first and that would have driven other aspects of evolution, but that turned out not to be true - first came walking upright and a more delicate skeleton, then came a larger brain, the ability to make tools, an even larger brain, and so on.