ABSTRACT
The discoveries of physical anthropologists and geneticists have indeed established that we belong to the primate family. The line of hominids differentiated from that of other apes about five million years ago. We share with chimpanzees and bonabos between 98 percent and 99 percent of our structural genes. There was probably a positive feedback loop between the expansion of the hominid brain and meat eating. The hominid brain is three times as big as that of an ape of similar body size. In hominid females, the pelvic opening widened to compensate for the increased brain size of the hominid infant. A solution to the problem of increased hominid brain size was the natural selection of those hominids that produced children born 'too early ' with brain size only one third that of an adult. In contrast, baby apes are born with a brain one half the sizes of that of an adult ape.
