A substantial population of high redshift early-type galaxies is detected in
very deep UBVRIJHK images towards the HDF-South. Four elliptical profile
galaxies are identified in the redshift range z=1-2, all with very red SEDs,
implying ages of >2 Gyrs for standard passive evolution. We also find later
type IR-luminous galaxies at similarly high redshift, (10 objects with z>1,
H1 Gyr. The number
and luminosity-densities of these galaxies are comparable with the local
E/SO-Sbc populations for \Omega_m>0.2, and in the absence of a significant
cosmological constant, we infer that the major fraction of luminous
Hubble-sequence galaxies have evolved little since z~2. A highly complete
photometric redshift distribution is constructed to H=25 (69 galaxies) showing
a broad spread of redshift, peaking at z~1.5, in reasonable agreement with some
analyses of the HDF. Five `dropout' galaxies are detected at z~3.8, which are
compact in the IR, ~0.5 kpc/h at rest 3500\AA. No example of a blue IR luminous
elliptical is found, restricting the star-formation epoch of ellipticals to
z>10 for a standard IMF and modest extinction.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal
Letters, discussion of clustering added, color image available at
http://astro.berkeley.edu/~tjb/nic3.htm