There are thousands of different cultures around
the world, each one with its own beautiful, fascinating, unique expression of what it means to
be human. I truly mean that, wherever you're from, wherever you're watching this there is something
really special about your culture. I I believe that to my core. Every person, every nation,
absolutely everybody has their own story to tell it's just it's just what makes history and
archaeology so endlessly interesting. Despite all of our differences though there's one story which
is shared by absolutely everyone, our evolution. Today I want to discuss what we know, but
more importantly what we don't know about the evolution of you. We're going to take a look
at the last common ancestor of us and our closest relatives neanderthals and denisovans. We're going
to discuss the evidence for our African evolution before moving on to when we left that region
burst onto the world like a invasive species and the contradictory evidence that really
runs right through the heart of our ideas. It should be well good. It should
be well interesting, big thumbs up! Before I start the video, I do have to give a
massive thanks to boneclones.com for providing me with this wide array of hominin skulls that you
see before you. I've been using boneclones.com since august 24 2019 when I made a video on
paranthropus here. If you've seen any of my videos on human evolution all the skulls have come
from boneclones.com. The reason I buy from them is because these are exact replicas of specific
fossils that they (archaeologists) found. These aren't just facsimiles ,these don't just
approximately look like a neanderthal. This is an exact replica of a neanderthal skull, an exact
replica of a homo erectus skull, and i really love that attention to detail. That's the
attention to detail I try to bring with the information in my videos and so that's the
attention to detail I like in the props that I use for these videos. If you're interested in human
evolution, I know you're probably interested in what they sell. I would probably own paranthropus
even if i didn't make these videos because it was learning about them that really sparked
my interest in human evolution and pre-history and realistically it changed the course of my
life. I love having a visual memento of that. I love being able to look paranthropus boise in
the face every day and and see my evolutionary history in the flesh.... in the flesh? Not
in the flesh these aren't these aren't real But i love being able to to see that I just
truly love owning these things they're so interesting to me and everyone who comes into my
house always asks about the skulls uh it's just a cool as hell thing to own so if that tickles
your interest a little bit i suspect it might head on over to boneclones.com There's a link
in the pinned comment. Link in the description. Use promo code stefan for $20 off and
yeah big shout out to bone clones for providing me these skulls to make
this video as cool as possible. Usually when we talk about a last common ancestor
we're talking about the very earliest hominins before even the australopiths. The last common
ancestor of us and chimpanzees. However, today as we're really hyper focusing on the
evolution of homo sapiens, you and me. We're focusing on the last common ancestor of us and our
closest relatives, neanderthals and denisovans. Who were they? When did they live? Where did they
live? These are all fantastic questions that to put it frankly uh we don't have the answer to.
Homo erectus was probably the first hominin to leave Africa at around 1.8 million years ago and
this left scattered populations of archaic humans across Africa, Asia and Europe. Each
one going about their lives, evolving, adapting to their particular climate, their
particular circumstances but also periodically meeting, boinking, swapping genes, swapping
ideas. Trying to pinpoint our direct ancestor, untangling them from this really complicated
web of relationships is naturally an extremely difficult thing to do. Genetic studies
of five neanderthal remains from Belgium, France, Croatia and Russia have shown that the
last common ancestor lived at least five hundred and thirty thousand years ago. But that's just the
the minimum time. It could have been as long as seven hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand,
maybe even 1 million years ago who knows. So we have this roughly 300,000 year period, maybe even
longer, when they could have lived but exactly who it was is not known. This time period is
known as the muddle in the middle because before it we had homo erectus after it we
have neanderthals, homo sapiens, denisovans, but between these two groups of archaic humans
it's just an absolute mess and we just have a very difficult time understanding the relationships
between the fossils that we have found and unfortunately as well we haven't actually
found that many fossils from this key time period. So it's really hard to answer these big questions
when we're just dealing with a few specimens. One key puzzle in this whole debate has been
the site of sima de los huesos, the pit of bones, fantastic name, in atapuerca, sort of
north-central Spain. 430,000 years ago this region was home to a group of hominins who were living
a really classic paleolithic lifestyle. They were almost certainly living in their family groups,
hunting large game like rhinos and horses with primitive wooden spears, and perhaps deliberately
bringing their dead to this cave. There's not much evidence of occupation at the sima, it doesn't
really look like anyone was living there. We also don't see much evidence of carnivore activity
and yet 28 hominins were deposited there. It's possible that these archaic humans, these ancient
hominins were deliberately bringing their dead to this particular spot. Which raises so many
interesting questions about their intelligence and their society and and how they lived together
and how they loved each other, maybe? It's really absolutely a fascinating place. These remains
have been given the title homo heidelbergensis, which is a a notoriously difficult hominin species
to define. Because we have this muddle in the middle where we aren't sure of the relationships
between the hominins many fossils have been given the title homo heidelbergensis but whether they
truly are all the same species and deserve to be grouped together is a matter of huge debate.
Was this group of hominins our common ancestor though? It seems not. Genetic tests revealed
that they were early or proto-neanderthals, after the split between us and neanderthals and
firmly on their side of our family tree. To be fair some anthropologists had predicted this based
on the similarities between neanderthal and the skulls from atapuerca but it is always obviously
fantastic to get that genetic confirmation, and to be able to really accurately place them on our
evolutionary tree. So as interesting as they are, they are not a direct ancestor of homo sapiens
they were not the common ancestor of us and neanderthals. Let's stay in atapuerca but go
further back in time to around 850,000 years ago. In 1994 archaeologists discovered the remains of
several people, mainly children, who seemingly had been the victims of cannibalism. What can i
say? Life was hard in the paleolithic. Sometimes your ancestors probably had to eat children,
that's just the way it went back in the day. These remains have been given the title homo antecessor,
or pioneer man, and the best preserved of them is called the child of gran dolina. This child (girl)
was about 10 years old when they seemingly became someone's lunch and the remains have attracted a
lot of attention because of the flatness of the face. One of the key features that anthropologists
and archaeologists look for in a fossil to determine whether it's a homo sapiens is this flat
face placed directly under the skull and, as you can see this child of gran dolina, their face
is very flat compared to earlier hominins like homo erectus and even later hominins like homo
heidelbergensis. It seems flatter like ours. So was this child a direct ancestor of ours, a very
distant ancestor of ours? Well again it seems not. Getting dna out of a fossil that is 850,000 years
old is exceptionally difficult but new scientific techniques analyze individual proteins which
survive better in the archaeological record. Proteins on their own of course cannot
give us as much information as DNA, so please bear in mind that this uh interpretation
of the results could change dramatically in the future if we improve our technology. But
proteins can give us clues to ancestry and it seems that homo antecessor was perhaps
a sister group of our last common ancestor. Living around that same time, a very close
relative but not our direct ancestor, not the common ancestor, not an early example of
the homo sapiens lineage. The child of gran dolina really illustrates a difficult problem that
anthropologists have. Just because a specimen might share many of the same physical features
as us, it does not mean that they're our direct ancestor. Evolution spins a really complicated
web. So as it stands none of the remains from atapuerca are on our homo sapiens lineage or are
the last common ancestor of us and neanderthals. This is basically the situation across the
entire world. Anthropologists have been able to exclude some examples and determine who is not
our direct ancestor but finding that common ancestor finding those really early homo sapiens
has eluded us, we still have not found them yet. Considering what we're going to discuss later
about the origins of our species in Africa, it is very likely that the common ancestor of us and
neanderthals lived there. But the past being so complicated, we do have to keep an open mind
that the common ancestor of us neanderthals and denisovans could have lived in Eurasia. After
all that is where our two closest relatives lived and evolved so it's not unreasonable at all
to think that our common ancestor might have lived somewhere in western Asia, maybe even in
south Asia, India. Our understanding of this time period in India is not great.
We have a lot of tools but so far no human remains from this very early time period
so we have to keep an open mind that they they could have lived in India perhaps. So
anthropologists are keeping an open mind uh but nevertheless Africa for sure
has a special place in our evolution Wherever our ancestors lived before 300,000
years ago, it's abundantly clear that since that time Africa has been the beating heart of
our evolution. This is confirmed not only by the fossil record but also overwhelmingly by our
genetics. There are key features of our anatomy that anthropologists look for when trying to
determine whether a fossil is a homo sapiens or not. As I mentioned earlier we have a small
flat face, this face should sit directly under our brain case, we have a really distinctive chin,
and we have this really round skull. Globular is the technical term, globby globby glob glob. Now
of course we have to bear in mind that there is a lot of variation in how modern humans appear and
this variation extends deep into the paleolithic, probably even more variation honestly. So
these aren't necessarily hard and fast rules uh but these are these are the features that
could indicate that a fossil is a homo sapiens. The earliest fossils that we could describe as
potentially being a homo sapiens and archaic form of homo sapiens come from Jebel Irhoud
in Morocco and date to around 300,000 years ago. So far five individuals have been excavated
and as you can see they do have this small flat face directly under the brain case but this skull
is not globular. It's it's egg-shaped, it's much similar to a neanderthal much more similar to
homo heidelbergensis. Because of the shape of this skull we can't consider them modern humans,
modern homo sapiens but they have enough features that we could consider them perhaps archaic homo
sapiens. A very early ancestor of ours. Over on the other side of Africa from Herto, Ethiopia, the
owner of this skull lived around 160,000 years ago and as you can see is very round very globular but
has these absolutely chunking brow ridges. Really thick, really pronounced and that's a very archaic
feature you could say in our in our species. As you can see from these two examples, humans in
Africa during this middle paleolithic exhibit a real mosaic of features. The evolution into
our modern form anatomically modern humans seems to have been a really slow process that
has taken hundreds of thousands of years. This mosaic of features continues for a long time
in the archaeological record. A skull from Omo in Ethiopia is very round, very modern looking but
dates to 190,000 years old. Skulls from Qafzeh in Israel day to around 120 to 90,000 years
old and again are quite modern. I know Israel is not in Africa we're gonna get to that don't
worry. Yet a skull from Iwo Eleru in Nigeria has a much more archaic form, like Jebel
Irhoud. Has this egg-shaped brain case but is as recent as roughly 13,000 years old, that's roughly
when this person lived. This complicated picture of different alleged homo sapiens with with
a variety of features is made all the more complicated by the fact that we know that other
distinct archaic forms of humans lived in Africa at around the same time. Homo naledi lived around
236 to 335,000 years ago and seemingly is a much smaller form of hominin. We also have this Kabwe
skull which is considered a homo heidelbergensis and has, you know, really archaic features dates
to only 300,000 years old as well. How all these different groups of hominins interacted and
what role they played in our evolution, in the evolution of homo sapiens is not known. There is
some genetic evidence that homo sapiens interbred with an archaic human around 124,000 years ago
in Africa but it's it's a very recent study and the implications of this result are not well
understood. Is the skull from Iwo Eleru a late survivor of one of these archaic forms of human
or is it just that homo sapiens in this region retained some archaic features much longer than
anywhere else? It's really hard to answer this question because we just have one skull with
no genetic tests. So we have absolutely no idea of the context that Iwo Eleru lived in,
the context that they evolved in. The skull from Nigeria is an interesting outlier though, in
general what we see in the archaeological record is a clear progression from egghead to tennis ball
head. So what parts of our brain were changing and developing that caused this change of shape
and what can that tell us about our evolution? Let's look at two brains, two endocasts
from our evolutionary history. One from three hundred thousand years ago,
Jebel Irhuod, and a modern human. These brains are roughly the same capacity, there's not much
difference in size but they have been reorganized, they have changed shape. So what parts grew
and developed and what can we deduce from that? "two features of this process stand out periatal
and cerebellar bulging. Parietal areas are involved in orientation, attention, perception of
stimuli, sensory motor transformations, underlying planning, physio spatial integration, imagery,
self-awareness, working and long-term memory, numerical processing, and tool use. The cerebellum
is associated not only with motor-related functions like the coordination of movements
and balance, but also with spatial processing, working memory, language, social
cognition, and effective processing". Clearly there is an evolutionary
pressure an evolutionary advantage in increasing our creativity, increasing our
perceptions, increasing our adaptability. This might seem an obvious thing to say
considering the vast amount of creativity we're surrounded by every day... like this
wonderful youtube video, the highest form of art. "oooooh i'm an artist" It is really interesting to think about this
brain development though. This progression from egghead to golf ball head over the past 300,000
years is mirrored in the archaeological record by an increase in creativity by an increase
in the sophistication of tools. The people living in Jebel Irhoud 300,000 years ago probably
didn't have no creativity, no symbolic expression because we see, you know, engravings
on shells from 500,000 years ago that were created by homo erectus. It's not
much but it shows that these archaic humans, there's something going on up there there's
a spark, there's a creative spark. By 100,000 years ago, you know, we're starting to see much
more rounder skulls in the archaeological record and we see the development of really specialized
bone tools like this harpoon from the Congo. We see in South Africa real great evidence for art
and symbolic expression from ochre and carved ostrich eggs and jewelry made from shells. Moving
forward in time by fifty thousand, forty thousand, thirty thousand years ago this globular brain
shape is, other than a few outliers, absolutely ubiquitous across homo sapiens and the evidence
for symbolic expression and specialized tools is overwhelming. No one could look at the art from
this time period and think that these were just simple cavemen. Nothing could be further from
the truth. No archaic human ever quite reached the level of creativity and symbolism that we
see produced by modern humans. Even though our opinion of neanderthals has changed dramatically
over the past 30 years, you know, they were very intelligent, very sentient humans, truly humans
yet they did not have this globular brain shape and they didn't have as well a developed artistic
expression. So even though our brains didn't really increase in size this reorganization seems
to have been absolutely key to our development. "um i am a glob globby glob
globby globby head artist" that's why humans are man
we're globby globy artists. The genetic evidence for our evolution in Africa
is is overwhelming, it's almost undeniable. Obviously everything is subject to change
but this evidence is really overwhelming, it has to be said. African populations
have a higher genetic diversity than anywhere else in the world and the further
you move away from Africa the more that genetic diversity declines. Now I don't want you to get
offended, or get hurt, or get worried, i'm not accusing everyone outside of Africa of being one
giant Hapsburg dynasty, there's plenty of genetic diversity to go around. But this does illustrate
that Africa is almost certainly the place that we evolved in. In biology this is called the
serial founder effect. If you had a region where a species evolved, that region is going
to contain the entire genetic diversity of that species. If one group breaks off and moves into a
new region, then that new region can only contain the diversity of the group that split. This is the
pattern that we see in the archaeological record. Africa high diversity, outside of Africa lower
diversity. We don't just use the serial founder effect to discuss our movement outside of Africa,
it's a really key tool that anthropologists and geneticists can use to trace human migrations.
Let's look at mitochondrial haplogroup L3. A haplogroup is basically a a line of descent,
a lineage that you can trace back to one person deep in pre-history. So mitochondrial haplogroup
L3 are the living descendants of this L3 woman who lived way back in time. The L3 haplogroup is found
widely across sub-saharan Africa and interestingly to this whole debate it is the haplogroup that
every ancient fossil that we have dna from outside of Africa descended from, and it is the haplogroup
that every non-african haplogroup descends from. Let me repeat that, that's worth repeating.
Every mitochondrial haplogroup outside of Africa descends from L3, every single one. If you are not
an African you are a descendant of this L3 woman, who was almost certainly African. No ifs, no
butts, no coconuts from Australia to Aberdeen and everywhere in between you are a descendant
of this L3 woman, and even if you are from Africa there is also a very strong chance that
you are a descendant of this woman too. Stefan from the future here, quick
interruption. I shouldn't have said no coconuts, there are always coconuts with these things our
evolutionary history is not straightforward. In this particular situation the coconut
is not whether you are related to L3 woman but the coconut is whether L3 woman did live in
Africa there is some debate as to whether humans had already left that Africa by that point and
we're in western Asia or maybe even south Asia, India. If that is the case, if L3 women had
already left Africa, that wouldn't negate the fact that we had evolved there it would just mean
that we had left earlier than we currently realize. There's always coconuts, I shouldn't
have said that there are always coconuts. Now mitochondrial DNA, is just a very small part
of our entire genetic makeup but this has been confirmed time and time again. In 2016
a study combined literally hundreds of genetic tests to create a phylogenetic
relationship of humanity. The pattern is the same guys Africa is at the core
of our DNA. If that wasn't enough, we don't just see this pattern in our genetics we
also see it in the genetics of bacteria that live within us. Helicobacter pylori, i think that's
how you say it, is a bacteria that lives within our guts and causes stomach cancer and ulcers and
stuff like that. It's really an absolute bastard but nevertheless lives within us. We see
the same pattern of genetic diversity. Helicobacter in Africa, high diversity, outside
of Africa low diversity. This suggests that this bacteria was present in the homo sapiens that
first left Africa and as a result suffered a loss of genetic diversity just as us homo sapiens
did. Which is really fascinating. I if you are suffering from stomach cancer i am sorry, I truly
wish you a speedy and painless recovery, but it is genuinely interesting that we can learn about
our evolution from that, that is crazy to me! So as it stands at the minute, the earliest
fossils that we could describe as homo sapiens, archaic homo sapiens, come from Africa
and the genetic evidence overwhelmingly suggests we evolved in Africa. That's a
huge region though, can we narrow it down further is there one specific place in Africa that
we evolved in? That is a highly debated topic. If we look at the fossils that we've already
mentioned, Jebel Irhoud, Herto, Omo, Qafzeh, plus a few others Florisbad in South Africa, Laetoli
in Tanzania, Guomde in Kenya, there is a huge pan-african distribution of these alleged homo
sapiens. I say alleged because not everyone agrees on their classification but these are basically
the contenders for archaic homo sapiens. The only region where it seems like there's a bit of a gap
is west Africa but that is the least well explored archaeologically so it is quite likely that that
is just a bias in the archaeological record. Either way though north to south there is a
huge distribution of these archaic homo sapiens. Considering this distribution it might really
be hard to find one particular point that we evolved in. This is the same in the genetic
record different studies have come to different conclusions about whether south Africa or
east Africa or west Africa or central Africa were the original home place of our species but
again it's just hard to untangle the genetic relationships between these groups that are
constantly mixing. I explained earlier that a haplogroup is is a line of dissent from one
person in in pre-history, well we can push that to its logical conclusion, it's extreme conclusion
and discuss the two people that every human on the entire planet is descended from we call
them mitochondrial eve and y chromosomal adam. These hypothetical people lived around 200,000
years ago. Let's say we found the region that they lived in, that's not necessarily the birthplace
of all of humanity, these are just two people whose genetics by probably absolute chance
have survived until the present day. It's not necessarily the first homo sapiens,
where they lived is not necessarily the home region of our species. So to
summarize even though anthropologists and archaeologists are very confident that
we evolved in Africa what we mean by that and exactly how that evolution took place is
still quite obscure and very highly debated. It does beg one massive question though if
we evolved in Africa ,when did we leave? 60-ish thousand years ago, if you're not
African that's when your ancestors left the continent. This estimate isn't based
on archaeological evidence though, really, it's based more on genetics. Remember
mitochondrial haplogroup L3? That branch of our family tree, that lineage formed
around 60,000 years ago. Or between 59 and 79,000 years ago and puts an upper limit on our
migration out of Africa. Certainly our ancestors, your ancestors did not leave that continent
before 79,000 years ago. That stomach bug i mentioned earlier, that divergence and their
genetics occurred around 58,000 years ago and other genetic studies have put a migration out
of Africa at around 55,000 years ago. So multiple genetic studies are all converging around roughly
similar dates, let's say between 55 and 70,000 years ago, our ancestors left Africa. This is
great, this is all fantastic evidence of course. There's one small problem though, archaeologically
we seem to have evidence of homo sapiens outside of Africa much, much earlier than that. As
I mentioned earlier, we know homo sapiens were living in the Levant between 90 and 120,000
years ago and a new study, hot off the presses, just released, has shown that there were multiple
migrations into western Asia within the last four hundred thousand years. This region is right next
door to Africa though, it's just a short hop, skip and a jump. In the north it is uh connected to
the continent and in the south the strait between Asia and Africa would have been only between
sort of 4 and 15 kilometers wide in pre-history. You could see Asia just over the shore, you could
swim it, probably, if you're a good swimmer. So really this south west region of Asia was home
to many hominins, many humans, many homo sapiens during our evolution. Now it is very dry, very
deserty, but there were lakes and rivers in this region periodically and it's only natural
to believe that humans just were following their climate, following the resources they
needed, following the food that they needed, and spent long periods of of our evolution in
western Asia. However, western Asia is not the only region that we find very early homo sapiens
remains. Archaeologists found a homo sapiens cranium from Apidima cave in Greece which dates
to around 230,000 years ago. Homo sapiens teeth have been found in China. Their dates are between
80 and 113,000 years ago. We were in Sumatra by 70,000 years ago and the north coast of Australia
by 65,000 years ago. Those last two are within the sort of window of out of Africa suggested by our
genetics but they're right at the top end of it, we really would have had to have dashed along the
south coast of Asia to get there by those times, which is possible but still we have those remains
in Greece, we have those remains in China, we have a lot of hominin tools in India
that we haven't been able to pin on someone. So how do we reconcile the tension between the
genetic evidence and the archaeological evidence? The first possibility is that we have missed the
genetic signals of these earlier migrations. In 2016 geneticists reported a previously undetected
genetic signal in the genes of people in Papua New Guinea that suggested that they had a
contribution to their DNA of homo sapiens around 120,000 years ago. It was just a tiny fraction of
their DNA, around 2%, so they are certainly still predominantly relatives of that later migration
out of Africa, but it is possible that we we have missed these earlier genetic signals
of an earlier migration. However other studies knowing that geneticists had come to this result
tried to to replicate it and and so far have been unsuccessful. So at the minute it's really
up for up for debate, it hasn't been proved at the minute that we have this genetic signal uh
within us from an earlier migration out of Africa. The other explanation therefore is that
these earlier migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa have not left a lasting genetic
legacy, they weren't really our direct ancestors, they weren't ultimately successful you could say.
This raises a lot of questions. If homo sapiens expanded out of Africa, but died out before this
later migration at 65,000 years ago, why did they die out and other archaic humans like neanderthals
and denisovans survived? If these communities of homo sapiens survived until this later
migration, then why don't we see more evidence of interbreeding between these two lineages of ours?
Especially considering the abundant evidence we have for interbreeding with other archaic humans?
That does raise questions, if they survived until that point that is an interesting question. We
know from studying archaic DNA within Europe and early European fossils that we are not really
a close relative to the first europeans anymore that there has been a lot of population turnover.
So these things are are possible, it is certainly possible that these earlier migrations died out.
Whatever caused that expansion of homo sapiens between 55 and 70,000 years ago to be successful
it's clear we absolutely burst onto the scene we we kicked the door in we rampaged
around the world like an invasive species. We reached australia by 65,000 years ago Europe by
47,000 years ago the far northern coast of Eurasia by 45,000 years ago, North America by 24,000
years ago, maybe even earlier, highly debated. Everywhere we went populations of large animals
seemed to die out soon after. We absolutely went wild, there's no question about it. What gave us
that killer edge? What allowed us to expand like that at the expense of everyone else and to be
so much more successful than any other archaic human, any other earlier migration of homo
sapiens? It could have been our technology. "One reason why humans failed to settle
more permanently might be competition. Perhaps the presence of neanderthals and other
human populations in number was a key reason behind this? I think this might be one factor,
but not the single explanation. I think it is more likely that before dispersing into the wide
range of environments in Eurasia, homo sapiens had first to develop a gamut of new and improved
technologies in order to survive and prosper". 48,000 years ago in what is now southwest Sri
Lanka, a group of homo sapiens called this dense rainforest home. The rainforest really
is a is a very different environment to the grasslands of Africa that we seemingly
evolved in. Even though it's very green, very lush, it's not an easy environment
to survive in. But nevertheless this group adapted. Archaeologists have found a trove
of arrows made from the bones of monkeys that these prehistoric homo sapiens left behind. One
of the arrows even has lines engraved on it which ethnographically other hunter-gatherers have used
to attach poisons to arrows. It's possible that that some of these other bones were used as darts,
that's another possibility. Technology like the bow and arrow must have been a very important part
of their survival strategy, it's very hard to hunt the small and agile game that live in the the rain
forest, live in the canopy of the jungle, without these quick, fast weapons. The earliest evidence
we see of bows and arrows in the archaeological record come from Africa interestingly between
60 and 70,000 years ago, right on the cusp of our migration. It's fascinating to me that this
community of hunter-gatherers in the rainforest, hunting monkeys with their bows and arrows, were
contemporaries of the humans that were living in the far north of Siberia, the far north of Eurasia
who were hunting mammoths and huge game like that, and living in a wildly different environment.
These two groups of homo sapiens were closely related, their ancestors had left Africa maybe
only 15,000 years before. Yet one group went north and adapted to the cold, one group hugged the
south coast of Asia, adapted to the rainforest. This level of flexibility is only seen in
modern humans, not in any other archaic human, not in archaic homo sapiens, not in neanderthals,
not in denisovans. They adapted by following their preferred environment as the climate changed
around them, this later migration of homo sapiens was able to adapt by changing their lifestyle.
In times of climatic variability, we were still able to expand, they contracted. We don't see any
evidence of neanderthals or anyone else producing technology like bows and arrows, atl-atls, blow
guns they just seemingly did not produce them. This is honestly my seventh or
eighth attempt at ending this video, because I feel like I should say something
profound about our evolutionary journey but I just, I just don't know what to say.
I don't know what profound thing to say. It's so hard because the point we're at in
this video where i'm sat on this log right here is about 30,000 years ago. Humans, homo sapiens,
have spread across the entire planet. All our archaic cousins have either been absorbed into
our communities or are dead. After 30,000 years ago it just seems like they're no more and yet
even though we've been on this journey for a million years by this point, this is the start
of human history, what we consider like the upper paleolithic, the mesolithic, neolithic,
on and on and on through time. The video ends at the point where all of human history kind of
starts. So I just uh i don't know what to say, i don't know what profound thing to say so
I'm going to steal that quote from Winston Churchill. This is not the end, it's not even
the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning. Thanks for watching guys loads
more videos on human evolution, pre-history, our story to come there's so much more
to say and uh i appreciate you watching. Boop!
The purpose of me posting this video, is to present an objective explanation of human evolution from the perspective of people who are involved with archeology, paleontology, and general science as well as people who just plain love history. Jehovah's Witnesses, like many other fundamentalist abd Bible literalist groups often characturize the process of evolution through bad faith arguments.
This wonderful video breaks down what is currently understood about the African origins of humankind and breaks it down Barney style. It discusses the challenges paleontologists go through to reconstruct the past acknowledges that we have a long way to go to get all the answers. But the verdict is in. It has been in for over 200 years. Like it or not. Evolution is real and humans are one of the best known examples of it.
Man I love Stephan Milo, he does such a great job and such good research into this stuff. It’s so interesting to me learning about the history of our species and the different offshoots of the homo genus that used to exist as well as Australopithecus and Paranthropus genuses, and to me it’s really humbling to learn about it all and how it’s all managed to culminate in us, Homo sapiens. As well as the new adaptations in Homo sapiens that could’ve eventually led to speciation had certain populations remained isolated like the population living on an island in Oceania with enlarged spleens that are able to dive for 14 minutes on average or those with increased hemoglobin in their blood so they can survive higher altitudes. And even just the fact that a third of the population can drink milk into adulthood now, idk to me everything to deal with this is just fascinating
Commenting to watch later