Jain Journal 1980 07

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 25

16
Mysterious human foot-prints at Bambuzi in Southern Rhodesia, Africa. These seemingly sacred carvings might be the work of wilton people about 6,000 years ago.
JAIN JOURNAL
at Lake Turkana and at Ethiopia in the same continent have indicated that the hominids of parallel lines with degrees of physical evolution appeared in the scene about 2 million years ago and in earlier times. In this connection it has been held by prehistorians that the hominids in course of their slow and diverse process of development engaged themselves in food-quest and eventually after thousands of years since the recognizable beginning of their career on earth their style of survival changed from food-gathering to food-growing. Originally relying on nuts, fruits, edible roots etc. in an arboreal environment the ancestors of man changed their food-habit in different climatic environments at least at particular regions. An excerpt from an article published in Time, Nov. 1977, as given below sums up the trends as best as possible.
"Anthropologists now believe that man's family tree goes back to a primate called Dryopithecus, a true ape that appeared about 20 million years ago. Much later-by 14 million years ago the Dryopithecus line had split into three branches. One branch evolved into the ancestors of to-day's great apes--the gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans, which are man's closest living cousins. Another produced a creature called Gigantopithecus, a huge ground ape that roamed the valleys of Asia for a few million years before it became extinct. A third branch gave rise to Ramapithecus, which most anthropologists believe was a distant ancestor of man.
"The cause of the changes can be traced, at least in part, to plate tectonics, the movement of the great crustal plates that ride on the earth's semi-molten mantle and provide its solid outer shell. Some 45 million to 50 million years ago, the plate that carries the Indian subcontinent