210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
latimes.com
latimes.com
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.)
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
Sounds a lot like what we know about Neanderthals.
Also Genesis is sort of the "deep memory" of humanity. Especially the first few chapters.
Compared to the Neanderthals, Genesis writers are our contemporaries.
Genesis writers first-hand knowledge about Neanderthals is similar to that most people nowadays have. Their general knowledge is far lesser.
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?
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?
There's evidence the indigenous Australians passed down knowledge of the end of the last glaciation period [1] 10000 - 13000 years ago.
[1] https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://austhrutime.com/first_boat_people.htm
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...
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.
If someone traveled from 1919 to 2019 their mind would be blown.
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.
Yes, but not for long.
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.
But the new discovery discussed in the article throws that into question. As the Atlantic writes:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/apidima-...
> 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?
Doesn't exactly hit your question but gives a good overview.
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
https://www.history.com/news/dna-study-finds-aboriginal-aust...
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
See also the genetics of the San people here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people#Genetics
One of his observations was imagining what a disaster it would have been if this finding had gone the 'other' way.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth#/media/File...
Although I imagine the likely explanation is just that sometimes things fall next to each other.
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.
I though fossils were dated with Carbon-14. Did that change?
If we do survive it will be by changing and adapting to the point of not being human any more.
Most importantly they didn't have the ability to directly edit their own genes.
How? Is there traceable amount of Uranium-238 in every handful of dirt around the world?
Nobody ever got a grant or a paper published for revising towards a younger date. No discovery in that.
Really? Is there a published paper with evidence supporting this claim?