The First Step in the Journey

The first step in human evolution was undoubtedly the discovery of the homicidal weapon from the hand tool. No related species has ever crossed this threshold though tool usage is common among many of them. The killing weapon would have been used on fellow hominids first, much before animals began to be killed with it. The reason for this is that no hominid at that stage of evolution had the intelligence to reason out that tools can be used to kill animals. But there appeared an extremely compelling reason for using a tool for homicide. The hominid society at that stage probably had a dominance hierarchy entirely based on physical strength similar to that of the present day gorillas. When the alpha male exerted his control through terribly oppressive measures the long suffering weaker males probably experimented with tools as weapons against him. As a consequence the first act of human evolution would have occurred when one or more weaker males used a stone to attack and seriously injured or killed an alpha male that was either preoccupied or asleep.