The separation of the ancestral line leading to human beings from the line leading us to the Chimpanzees, our closest nonhuman relatives, probably occurred between 5 and 8 million years ago. By 2.5 million years (Cichon 1985, Pilbeam 1986) there was at least two kinds of hominids (members of the human family) called the Australopithecines, which became extinct, and the other called Homo Habilis, which was remote but a direct ancestor of our species. We know they were hominids because their limbs and bodies were already completely adapted to walking upright. There are even 3 million year old Australopithecine footprints to prove it. Hominids were not thereafter initially selected for their braininess but for their peculiar upright gait. Why this Gait called bipedalism was selected is still up for debate but it was clear that once hands were not longer needed for walking or running tool use could expand far beyond tool use of monkeys and apes. Bipedal creatures could manufacture and carry tools such as clubs, digging sticks and stone hammers and knives without lessening their ability to explore, move about and flee from danger.

Some 2 million years ago Homo Habilis was succeeded by larger and brainier human ancestors called Homo Erectus. Despite it’s larger brain, however homo erectus does not appear to have had a markedly advanced capacity for complex mental tasks. For almost 1.3 million years, the tools manufactured by Homo Erectus changed very little  while it’s brain size increased only slightly or not at all. About 200,000 years ago the pace of both biological and cultural evolution quickened by leading to the appearance in Africa of the first anatomically modern homo sapiens between 150,00 and 100,000 years before the present day. About 40,000 years ago the relationship between cultural and Biological Evolution underwent profound changes and increased the  average size of the human brain, and the complexity and the rate of change of human sociology-cultural systems increased by many orders of magnitude. It is clear that a kind of take off had occured whereby cultures to evolve more rapidly than our kind’s genotypes. In the last 40,000 years we have proven that more attention must be given to cultural vs biological processes. However, in a time when biology is being used against the homo sapien for control and bio-warfare, it is time once again to pay attention to biology.  Natural selection and organic Evolution lie at the base of culture, but once the capacity for culture becomes fully developed a vast number of cultural differences and similarities could arise and and disappear entirely independent of changes in genotypes (M. Harris 1989).