1 The concept of speciation was briefly covered in the Introduction, but it is worth pausing to examine its specifics in greater detail. The concept of the biological entity of "species" is fundamental to biology. If animals are unable to interbreed or if they will not, as per the example of the Siberian warblers, they are given separate species designations. Species are further divided into Mendelian populations, which are breeding populations (gene pool) from which males and females find their mate in the particular region where they reside. Isolation amongst breeding or Mendelian populations results in adaptive radiation and the emergence over time of new species. Different species are all related to one another, with varying depths of time since separation from a common ancestor. Homeobox genes play a central role in speciation.

2 Hindu creationism follows the standard creationist tact, with the exception of Christian creationist Intelligent Design proponents like Michael Behe but including the Intelligent Design followers of Philip Johnson, of emphasising the perceived lack of transitional fossils. This form of creationism is well expressed by Cremo & Thompson, its most prominent proponents, who focus solely on hominin evolution in "Forbidden Archeology" and "The Hidden History of the Human Race".

By accenting the worn-out theme of "no transitional fossils" and by emphasising the concept of humans having existed on earth in anatomically modern form for hundreds of millions of years, Cremo & Thompson unwittingly introduce an indirect angle upon which to approach the question at hand. If their proposition was to hold true, then our bodies would:
* Show no signs of quadruped ancestry;
* Have little or no anatomical characteristics in common with chimpanzees; and
* Be perfectly designed for bipedalism.

These points are not addressed in "The Hidden History of Humankind" (1999). The human body is badly designed. When dissected, it resembles a rag-tag, make-shift assemblage of components. A brief summary of the major points is presented in Table 1.

3 The artifacts referred to by Cremo & Thompson in the quote above are skeletal and stone tool remains. The former will be dealt with in detail in a following chapter. For now it is worthwhile outlining current theories regarding the stone tool usage amongst the early hominins. The term landscape is frequently used by archaeologists to categorise an activity, whether mental or physical, that is engaged in by hominins with their surrounding environment. Therefore landscape, as defined here, refers to the integration of natural and human settings, and the impact thereof. This definition in itself is very broad and it leaves open a large scope for varying degrees of application to and interpretation of the fossil and geological records. Hominin actions occur over both time and space, and therefore the end result examined by archaeologists (and also by other disciplines such as art historians and cultural geographers) is complex.

According to the laws of preservation, the further back in the past scientists investigate, the scantier the fossil, artifactual and habitation evidence they will have to deal with. The challenge faced is how to go about reconstructing the hominins' interrelationship with their environment. It is a debatable point whether early Homo possessed a capacity for symbolism at c. 1.5 million years ago (mya). Taken together, these factors impose strict limits on various research and interpretative tracks which can be applied to a given problem, thus leaving the door open for novel and innovative methods. Rather than searching for symbolic explanations of the placement of archaeological features in the landscape, archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists instead concentrate on functional, socio-economic probabilities through a combination of recorded studies of our nearest surviving relatives the chimpanzee, through typological analyses of the stone artifacts, through microscopic examinations of the damage exhibited on animal bone remains, and through the range, distribution and clustering density patterns of both the stone tools and animal bones.