ABSTRACT
The reader may wonder what a biologist might conceivably contribute to a volume devoted to monuments, that most culturally driven of all expressions of the human spirit. Most anthropologists reckon that the ancestral human species diverged from the ancestor of one of the African ape genera in the period between about 6 and 9 myr, but substantial fossil evidence is lacking until about 4 myr, when eastern Africa begins to yield fossils generally ascribed to the species Australopithecus afarensis. These hominids were small-bodied, the males standing about four feet, six inches tall and the females perhaps a foot shorter; their brains were relatively larger than those of the living apes, but not by much; they had large chewing teeth with substantially reduced canines housed in a projecting face; and their body proportions were completely different from ours, with long legs and short arms compared to trunk length.
