The Cooking Hypothesis credits this to the use of fire. No longer was large arms needed to swing from trees or mismatched body features to compensate from moving away from ape-like habits. The production of fire could afford the hominids protection from predators and food was made easier to consume, resulting in extra calories for brain development and fire became a useful tool for survival in the winter. The main issue with this theory is that the use of fire would need to be proved to exist around 1.8 million years ago when Homo erectus first emerged. Thus, the race for fire discovery has been at the forefront of evolutionary competition. During recent excavations in the Swartkrans cave, burnt bones were recovered from about 1.0–1.5 million years ago. The bones were found to have been heated to a range of temperatures consistent with campfires. The presence of these burnt bones is the earliest direct evidence for use of fire by hominids in the fossil record. Although abundant remains of Australopithecus robustus and Homo erectus are found in Swartkrans, there is no evidence of fire, suggesting that the discovery of fire was made in the interval before A. robustus became extinct. 3. Paranthropus robustus Genus name: Paranthropus robustus Age: 1.95 mya Discovered: Kromdraai, South Africa 1938 Discovered by: Gert Terrblanche – …show more content…
Studies show that Paranthropus was not widely adaptable to their surroundings and therefore their bodies were adapted to favourable environmental conditions. Because it was a specialist species, it had more difficulty adapting to a changing climate, leading to its extinction. This allowed the scientific community to make base comparisons between the Homo genus and the Paranthropus Genus, citing that the Homo genus succeeded where the Paranthropus failed by adapting to a wide range of foods included in their