Can someone link to a kind of summary of the current best understanding of human evolution and dispersal? It's really fascinating to me.
Until recently, I had naively understood "Out of Africa" to mean that homo sapiens evolved in Africa from some sort of ape like thing and then went out and conquered the world. But the idea that homo sapiens is just one of many kinds of human species, and that other ones like Neanderthals and Denosivans left Africa earlier (or evolved from homo erectus who left earlier still...?) is really mind blowing. It's weird to me to think of multiple human species living at the same time.
Homo Erectus: 1 million B.C. to about 500,000 B.C.
Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens split off from common ancestor: 500,000 B.C.
Homo Sapiens dominate Africa until about 70,000 B.C. when they spread into Europe, Middle East, and Asia.
Neanderthals dominate Europe, Middle East, and Asia, until 70,000 B.C. when Homo Sapiens return out of Africa.
There are a few other variations of humans in the 300KYA to 70KYA period, including:
Denisovans (found in Siberia and other places), the "hobbits" found in Indonesia.
It's possible and likely that around 100KYA, there were several species of humans cohabiting the earth, including modern humans (H. sapiens), Neanderthals, Denisovans, a few remaining H. Erectus, the hobbits, and some mixtures of the above.
Each discovery sheds new light and sometimes, as with this possible modern human skull, shatters old theories about the timeline.
It's fascinating to think that at one time in the not-too-distant past, there were multiple species of humans in existence, of which only one survived, though most non-African humans today carry 2-4% Neanderthal genes, so in a sense, some traits of the Neanderthals survived. We are the Neanderthals.
It's time we stopped using the term "Neanderthal" as an insult. They were possibly as smart as modern humans, had larger brains, had tools, ritual burial, weapons technologies, and art work. Their anatomical structure indicates that likely they had language. It's possible that they were gentler than H. Sapiens which would explain how they got gobbled up and made extinct, despite their vast strength (Neanderthals bone structure and muscle attachments indicate that they were many times stronger than modern humans.)
Sort of a tangent, but I've wondered before if the "Nephilim" mentioned in Genesis could have been some distant memory of when Humans coexisted with Neanderthals.
From Wikipedia:
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, "My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
— Genesis 6:1–4, New Revised Standard Version
Basically says that there were people like humans, but different and larger and stronger. And that at some point they died out.
Sounds a lot like what we know about Neanderthals.
Also Genesis is sort of the "deep memory" of humanity. Especially the first few chapters.
The writers of Genesis are our contemporaries, but my understanding is that the first few chapters is a recording of oral traditions that stretch back way further than that.
Would how often, in 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years would the complete chain of human intellectual lineage be broken, and a generation of people be raised with absolutely no input from the preceding generation?
Look through Wikipedia's page on Indo-European vocabulary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary#Kinsh...), and see how recognizable some of the fundamental building blocks of communication are, despite the passage of time, movement of people, and rise and fall of societies.
If word forms can so readily be passed down multiple inheritance trees over thousands of miles and years and still be somewhat recognizable, how improbable is it that we inherited living stories that co-evolved with us through thousands of generations?
I see the link you provided as evidence to the improbability of GP's premise.
Consider that common daily used words can change to a degree that they at best resemble their origin, and that in just a single or two millenniums. Do you believe any oral tradition can survive and preserve anything from it's original meaning after 20k years?
Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who knows (leaving aside kings and the like, where the stories are again only known from canonical origins)? Do you know the name of any of your ancestors from 4,000 years ago? The name of the place they lived in?
Again, 10000 - 13000 years ago is much closer to us than the Neanderthals are to the ancient Aboriginal Australians or the ancient Hebrewes. And this stories, if they indeed are 13,000 years old, are by far the oldest example we have.
Indigenous Australian oral history and cave paintings reference the "dreamtime"[0], which is plausibly the group's initial ocean crossing perhaps ~45k years ago.
More definitely, here[1] is an Australian oral tradition that records a catastrophe ~7k years ago.
The picture is super blurry but then so is Genesis.
So, AFAIR one interpretation of the relative ubiquity of ancient flood myths is that most established cultures had to live through a time of periodic glacial lake outburst floods as the climate warmed from the last glacial maxima, along with rising seas inundating some inland basins like the Persian Gulf.
I'm not sure about the probability or improbability of this premise in the grand scheme of all probable events, but it seems fair to call it a plausible premise. These events would mostly fit on a timeline of 15k years ago to 8k years ago. If this explanation holds water, it means that the origin events of these flood myths pre-date the earliest known forms of writing by at least as much as the writing of early known biblical texts predate the conversation we're having now.
I don't know if I "believe" it, but I definitely wouldn't bet against it. We're not talking about getting teenagers to faithfully memorize and repeat 100 generations of ancestral begats as read by Ben Stein. We're talking about compelling stories that were foundational to the mythos of who a people are and where they came from.
> Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who knows (leaving aside kings and the like, where the stories are again only known from canonical origins)? Do you know the name of any of your ancestors from 4,000 years ago? The name of the place they lived in?
We have writing now though. There is much less need to spend time memorizing the oral history of your family line when it can be written down.
At a time when anything you don't teach your children and grandchildren would be lost forever, it was much more important to pass on the stories of your ancestors through oral histories.
Genesis is but one example of an oral folklore. All cultures had them (before writing ... which invented forgetting, ref Socrates). i would not at all be surprised if their cladogram is pushed back in time to when we shared the earth with other Homo species
> The identity of Apidima 1 could also cast doubt on other archaeological finds from Europe, such as stone tools with no accompanying fossils. Researchers had long assumed that within a certain time window, “any archaeology was all the work of Neanderthals,” says Wragg Sykes. But if modern humans also occupied this “safe range,” which species actually created those artifacts?
> Homo Erectus: 1 million B.C. to about 500,000 B.C.
Can you imagine the period of sheer..uneventfulness?
It's an indescribable unease for me, imagining a planet where nothing really happens, just animals doing their thing... Even worse if you're a semi-sapient species, with just enough awareness to know that things could be better, but not seeing any improvement in your entire life..
I mean, imagine us staying basically the same for the next 50 years, with nothing really changing in human society, let alone a 100 years, let alone a 1000...
> there were multiple species of humans in existence, of which only one survived
If there were other sentient species on this planet co-existing with us, we probably killed them all.
Absolutely, things moved at a glacial pace back then... literally... since the Pleistocene (2.5 million BC to 11,700 BC) encompassed several ice age pulses -- freezes and thaws, over tens of thousands of years. We're currently in the thawing period of the latest ice age, by the way.
The ice ages, by the way, would have been quite intense. Over 1/3 of the Earth was covered by frozen ice caps, extending down past Britain to central Germany in Europe, and the Kansas region in the U.S. Imagine if the Arctic were that large. The habitable zones were commensurately smaller, the warm seasons were shorter, and oppressive winters were the norm. People anywhere near the ice caps would have had to adapt to the intense cold, both physiologically and technologically. If you didn't have fire and the means to hunt and take down large fur coated mammals on a regular basis, you died.
It's amazing to think that Homo Erectus, the dominant hominid circa 1 million BC, had fire and tools. They were far less advanced than H. Sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis, had smaller brains and smaller physical stature, but would have been fearsomely strong and fast nonetheless.
After half a million years, Erectus gave rise to more advanced species so some kind of change and adaptation was occurring, albeit slowly.
and imagine traveling from 2019 to 2119. It will probably be almost unrecognizable to us.
My daughter was born in 2004; she might live to 2119. Almost certainly, barring accidents, will live to see the 22nd Century. I only hope that she'll like it. There are so many dystopian predictions -- nanotech killers, evil AI, war.... I just pray that the world she and future generations inherit will be worth living in.
Homo ergaster had its own "Out of Africa" moment several hundred thousand years earlier, and branched into several subspecies like homo erectus; up to a million years before, there was even other homo species (maybe homo habilis?) that left Africa to become for instance homo georgicus.
On a darker note, one could almost see it as a form of mercy that none of the other species survived into the era of civilizations. Given our willingness to enslave other humans, I can only imagine what would have been done with "lesser" humans.
well they sort of did - modern Europeans are now acknowledged to carry some Neanderthal DNA (estimates go somewhere between 1.5-20% depending on how you count)
People who think that Neanderthals/etc were "lesser" humans (for whatever bogus reasons) probably also need to conclude (for the same reasons) that Europeans are also lesser humans
> People who think that Neanderthals/etc were "lesser" humans (for whatever bogus reasons) probably also need to conclude (for the same reasons) that Europeans are also lesser humans
The strongest real inferiority argument is that we survived and they didn't. But if they/we are still here then that's right out the window.
You forget about Africa which seems to have the largest genetic diversity of Homo Sapiens (the prehistoric dispora seems to have been a genetic narrowing point) - that means wider tails on bell curves - it's why they have the tallest and shortest populations, the fastest (and probably slowest), etc etc
Yeah, the Khoisan seem to be the FIRST population group to diverge from mainstream homo Sapiens (or was it the other way around?), and IIRC supposedly compose half of humanity by numbers back 100,000-20,000 years ago. It seems Ice Age Central and Southern Africa were the best biome for hunting-gathering humans.
Of course, post-agriculture most humanity lives in (East and South) Asia, except in Cyrus' age where a third of humanity lives in West Asia and Eastern North Africa. Persia ruled 1/3rd of humanity then, the most out of any empire after that. Except perhaps China of some periods
Poorly-aged tweet - in Who We Are and How We Got Here Robert Reich talks about the strong evidence for the existence of a "ghost population" that interbred only with the ancestors of modern sub-Saharan Africans. It's a ghost because we don't have any physical remains like we do with Neanderthals and Denisovans, but there is an ancient genetic signature that exists only in that population.
More generally - because people use motivated reasoning, you could just as easily spin the Neanderthal finding the opposite way. "Neanderthal ancestry is a secret superpower that makes Asian and European people special!" or whatever. Once you have your conclusion, you can spin the facts to fit your narrative.
Either we outcompeted them or they were more docile and we took advantage of that, or they kept retreating till they could retreat no more (if they feared interaction).
That's assuming homo sapiens were actually their undoing. They may have just died out on their own.
Or they haven't at all. Consider that people of European and Asian ancestry typically share some Neanderthal DNA, and the DNA difference between humans and chimpanzees is ~1%. Maybe they're just us.
In the beginning of Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens, he discusses the history of Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals), Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens. He discusses their history amongst eachother and why/how Homo sapiens succeeded. It then goes onto explain why Homo sapiens succeeded and grew into what humans are today (animal husbandry, agriculture, culture, industry, technology, information, etc).
There is also a good PBS miniseries of his work using the same title. One benefit is seeing his interactions with different aboriginal societies and how respectfully he treats their origin stories.
To have a feel of long period of time, I always use one metric: my grand father. He's lived 93 years, so almost 100. 2000 years ago was then 20 grandad away. Not so long ago after all. 200K ago is 2000 grandad away. Quite some time but nothing astronomical yet.
You can also think in terms of generations. If everyone has a kid at 20 then you can draw 100 stick figures in a line to go 2000 years back. Not so long when you look at it.
...except that a "grandfather" was taken to be 50 years, since what matters is not the length of an individual life, but the time between generations (and the transmission of extelligence). James Burke used it as well in his Connections 2, noting that when his grandfather would tell him about his grandfather telling him about how things were when he was a lad, we were already back to the heart of the industrial revolution.
Does it strike anyone else as odd that the two skulls found practically "nose-to-nose" are 40,000 years apart in age? How do two humanoid skulls coincidentally end up right next to each other with 40,000 years gap between them?
Sea mines placed miles apart during the second world war sometimes end up settling right next to each other, several miles away. Sometimes tens of miles away. Sometimes next to a leftover mine from the first world war that arrived the same way.
The environment in which they exist subjects them to varying pressures and forces, making them move. When do they stop moving? When they reach a point at which those pressures and forces cease. That point is the same for all items that get swept there. Wait long enough, and if another one is part of the same system of forces that directs towards the same null point, it'll turn up.
Happens with sea mines over the course of a few decades. Could it happen with skulls over tens of thousands of years? Sure could. Happens with lots of objects.
One of the articles I read stated they suspected the skulls were originally in different caves but had been caught in a flood that washed them into a common area.
You probably mean this as a joke, but we often underestimate our ancestors who were as smart and curious as we are (and surely as dopey and uncurious as well).
C14 dating loses precision dramatically past a certain age (~50k years, IIRC), because of the nature of half-lives. Since this is in the 200k range, C14 wouldn't be the go-to.
I don't remember specifics from college, but yes, I think there is uranium pretty much everywhere. Oceans, rocks, dirt, maybe not airborne, but everywhere else.
There is actually enough in the oceans that people have proposed concentrating it for commercial extraction. Probably not viable, but surprising to think about.
It seems like it should be the opposite right? There is no uranium being exchanged with the environment after burial, so you can determine the age by how much has decayed.
Until recently, I had naively understood "Out of Africa" to mean that homo sapiens evolved in Africa from some sort of ape like thing and then went out and conquered the world. But the idea that homo sapiens is just one of many kinds of human species, and that other ones like Neanderthals and Denosivans left Africa earlier (or evolved from homo erectus who left earlier still...?) is really mind blowing. It's weird to me to think of multiple human species living at the same time.