As crazy as it might seem, the oldest evidence we have of Australopithecus is not a fossil at all but a few footprints that have been preserved: they belong to three specimens of Australopithecus afarensis, the same species as the famous Lucy. Around 3.8 million years ago, at a site called Laetoli in what is now Tanzania, the Sadiman volcano covered the earth in a six-inch-thick bed of ash, which preserved the footprints of three Australopithecus specimens who walked through it together. （A POCKET HISTORY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION: How We Became Sapiens, by SILVANA CONDEMI, FRANÇOIS SAVATIE, The Experiment, 2019, Chap 1)
Silvana Condemi, a paleoanthropologist, is the research director of CNRS, the largest French public scientific research organization, at Aix-Marseille University. She is the coauthor, with Francois Savatier, of A Pocket History of Human Evolution: How We Became Sapiens. Francois Savatier is a journalist for the magazine Pour la Science (the French edition of Scientific American), where he focuses on the science of the past. He is the coauthor, with Silvana Condemi, of A Pocket History of Human Evolution: How We Became Sapiens.
… it’s very likely that from the end of the Pliocene epoch (5.3 to 2.58 million years ago) to the beginning of the Pleistocene (2.58 million to 11,700 years ago), several species of Australopithecus fashioned stone tools and used them—if not for hunting, then at the very least for cutting, harvesting root vegetables, and butchering dead animals. (ibid, Chap 2)
But it’s clear that one of these toolmaking Australopithecus species must be the origin of the human stone technology that initiated Sapiens’s technical domination of the world. (ibid, Chap 2)
Therefore, what truly separates Sapiens from Neanderthals is our behavior in relation to nature: our ecological behavior. Neanderthals behaved just like any another predator, removing from the environment only the necessary resources for them to survive, which always amounted to much less than Nature could provide. But Sapiens has a totally different behavior. As Homo sapiens hordes multiplied over time, they continued to take more and more resources from the environment, endangering one species after another, a process that—unfortunately for life on Earth—has never ceased. （ibid, Chap 7)
尼安德塔人為何滅絕，其腦容量1700ml，大于人類1350ml，其與自然的關係融洽，不會像人類一般貪婪無厭，侵略掠奪，竭澤而漁，意思是說，人類分明是一種卑劣物種，為什麼尼安德塔人，從演化歷史而言，反而敗給人類這個傢伙，
See also
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/australopithecus-afarensis
