ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors examine the adaptation to the tropical savanna of two very different kinds of hominids: the australopithecines, a term including hominids of Pliocene age and their successors, the earliest humans. They also examine for comparison a modern tribe who also have made their living hunting and gathering in the East African savanna, the Hadza. One of the most spectacular of the Earth's biomes, both in terms of its vast extent as well as in the number of herds of large animals it supports, is the tropical savanna While South America and Australia contain large expanses of tropical grassland, the best known and the most relevant for our purposes is the tropical savanna of Africa, and especially East Africa. The authors believe from the quite extensive fossil evidence that the small, gracile form probably gave rise to Homo, while the large, robust form became extinct about one million years ago.
