  A comprehensive set of all available magnitudes, colors and redshifts for
optically identified QSO absorbers is compiled from the literature. This
results in a largely unbiased sample of galaxies at high redshifts, the size of
the sample being reasonably large to allow for a first comparison with galaxy
evolution models. We use our evolutionary spectral synthesis models describing
various spectral types of galaxies with appropriate star formation histories.
  For a standard cosmology H0=50, Omega0=1, we find that all identified QSO
absorbers up to a redshift about z=2 do fall within the evolving range of
models which had been shown earlier to give good agreement with nearby galaxies
of various spectral types.
  The most striking result is that all spectral types of galaxies from E
through Sd seem to be present in this absorber candidate sample with the bulk
of the objects being spirals of type Sa to Sc.
  We also show that such kind of high redshift galaxy sample should allow for
significant restrictions of the cosmological parameters. While models with
H0=50, Omega0=1 and any redshift of galaxy formation zform=5 ... 10 give
reasonable agreement with observed luminosities and colors, present data seem
to exclude the combination H0=50, Omega0=0.1. A low Omega0 together with a
value of H0 > 50 might still be viable. Additional data, and in particular
observations of absorbing galaxies in more than one passband, are required for
further constraints. We realize that the present results depend on the adopted
evolutionary models and on the input physics used which might be better
constrained by future observations.
