I have referred to the importance of the 1974 discovery of Lucy, the australopithecine that revolutionised our understanding of hominin evolution.

The fact that Lucy was bipedal is significant, because it indicates that the freeing of the hand was crucial in the emergence of modern Homo sapiens.

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I referred to the fact that Frederick Engels, collaborator of Karl Marx, made the critical observation regarding the freeing of the hand from locomotion duties in his 1876 pamphlet The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.

In a previous article, I stated that paleontologists and archaeologists will fill in the blank spaces, long after Engels death. The liberation of the hand made possible the beginning of practical labouring activities. That is the basis of what makes us uniquely human.

I was looking for a way to elaborate these points in an article and, over the last few weeks, ample evidentiary confirmation of that proposition has been provided.

Dominic Alexander, writing in Counterfire, examines this very topic in an excellent article.

It is labouring activity that is the basis of consciousness, tool making and the emergence of modern humans. No, all these features did not emerge in a singular, explosive event. Bipedal locomotion preceded tool making behaviour by millions of years.

Be that as it may, Engels was correct to stipulate labour activity as the crucial component in the development of intelligence. It is through labouring that we modify and use our........

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