The Earth 10,000 Years Ago | 10,000 Subscribers Special

this channel has now reached over 10,000 subscribers which is absolutely crazy none of us expected it to grow as quickly as it has done over the past few months and we're all incredibly thankful to everyone who has shown us support so to celebrate the significant milestone we thought we'd all contribute together to make this special 10,000 subscriber video we're going to be taking a look at what the earth was like 10,000 years ago what life was like for the humans alive at the time what the climate was doing and what ancient animals were still around this just seemed like an appropriately themed way to celebrate 10,000 so we hope you enjoy it and thank you all again for showing your support and getting the channel to where it is now 10,000 years ago in 8000 BCE the world population was around five million humans inhabited all continents except Antarctica and our early relatives had already been using copper the first metal to be worked by humans for around seven hundred years at this point copper would not have been smelted but worked through a method called cold working where the copper is still solid and is bashed and rolled to harden it the earliest evidence of copper is a pendant from North Iraq has been dated to around 8000 BCE and shows that Mesopotamia was at the head of human civilization for many thousands of years this was mainly due to the Fertile Crescent which is also known as the cradle of humanity a crescent-shaped region of rich fertile land that stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates which gave rise to agriculture and permanent settlement one of these settlements was neva Lea quarry located in Turkey built around 8000 BCE is thought to be one of the oldest temples in the world sculptures of human figures and reliefs of hands were found on the site this shows how advanced humans already were at this point in time as they were creating not just stick figures depicting hunts for human figures itched in stone a much more laborious and time-consuming task the site sadly is now submerged after water from the affray teeth flooded it when the after turk Dam was constructed Jericho is another neolithic settlement and is thought to be the first town ever it was very advanced for its time with it containing houses made from sun-baked mud bricks and already having city walls as well as an 8 metre tall tower by around 8000 BCE it is estimated that over a hundred workers built these structures suggesting that the idea of social status with peasants and workers being controlled by Lords had already become a part of human society it was found that cereals both domesticated and wild were being harvested for food here whereas the majority of the rest the world was still living by hunting and gathering around a thousand years later the first use of counting tokens was occurring in the Fertile Crescent more evidence of how advanced the area was ten thousand years ago in Western Europe it was still the Mesolithic since the change between Mesolithic and Neolithic is marked by the point at which plants and animals start to be domesticated the Neolithic therefore came much later for Europe than it did in the Fertile Crescent many small dwellings existed such as Iero in Denmark and deep car in Britain these settlements were more primitive compared to ones in Mesopotamia with Flint tools being used and most people living in mud round houses humans arrived in the Americas via the Bering Strait around 15,000 years ago when a land bridge was exposed by low ocean levels these people were the ancestors of the Native Americans and their way of life did not change much until Europeans arrived ten thousand years ago in North America is classed as the archaic period as agriculture was never used on a large scale so the Neolithic never came about until much much later this period was defined by communities that had economies base of nuts and other hunted and gathered materials the archaic period ended in the Americas at different times due to much more advanced civilizations taking root in Central and South America Mexico much like the Fertile Crescent was going through the early Neolithic at this time with squash plants being domesticated first and in the valley of Mexico Chili Peppers era math and maize a ten thousand year old skeleton was found in an underwater cave in tulum showing that humans had made their way from the north to the Yucatan Peninsula these early villages and squash farms didn't change much for thousands of years but they were the foundation the first great civilization in America the Olmec and yes technology was a big thing ten thousand years ago - but not quite in the same way that it is today around 7000 to 8000 BCE the first cultivation of wheat and barley begins in northern Mesopotamia now Iraq which was first used for soup and beer and eventually made into bread the brilliant modern day machine called the plow hasn't quite been invented yet so a plowing stick was used instead speeding over to Korea now the incipit internment pottery period kicked off around this time named perhaps unsurprisingly because there's been many findings have similarly decorated pottery the early German period is filled with hunting deep-sea fishing and these people who lived in what were known in Europe as Grubin house or pit houses the most famous of these Korean settlements is probably the amp'd Saddam these pit house buildings were basically just half buried in the ground which provided an enormous protection from weather and also made great places to store food and let's be honest there was probably a ton of ancient Judah man dancing and parties going on in these things - it's probably all they did for entertainment there is another important thing to note though remember the copper mines that Ollie talked about earlier the advent of metal of around this time signifies a great change the end of the Stone Age lastly 3.6 million years it came to an end around 10,000 years ago although many historians argue it entered with the more widespread use of metalworking and the take is closer to 2,000 BCE so more like 4,000 years ago other technology included the first domestication of animals people in Mesopotamia which is this area here started bringing animals into human life for milk furs hides and of course meat goats were almost certainly the first animals to be tamed by humans followed closely by chickens this was trickier than it first sounds but the easiest animals to tame were the ones that would naturally graze on vegetation they're easy to feed and they don't need hunters to find meat for them about 11,000 years ago the last ice age came to an end and the earth was warming up this was part of the normal cycle of Earth's climate and was most likely caused by the Milankovitch cycles which is the way in which slight changes to the Earth's orbit around the Sun can affect the climate due to the melting glaciers sea levels rose dramatically Britain had been connected to Europe through an exposed land bridge called Duggar land and this is how humans forgot to Britain in the first place however due to rising sea levels this large expanse of land flooded and cut Britain off from the rest of Europe the Bering Strait also flooded cutting off the humans who had made it to the Americas from the rest of the world Britain and other places near the glaciers were covered in pine forests and tundra but as it got hotter these areas were replaced by birch forests the great plains of America used to be a much wetter region due to the glaciers redirecting rivers running east and sending them south many other areas of plains and tundra turned into forests because mass extinction of the megafauna due to the changing climate and spread of humans as we've just mentioned 10,000 years ago there was a mass extinction taking place known as the quaternary extinction event this devastating mass dying affected animals across multiple continents wiping out many of the unique creatures that we associate with the Ice Age this extinction had a particularly devastating effect on the megafauna and so it's also known as the quaternary megafauna extinction megafauna in this case refers to the large land mammals that dominated the environment several thousand years ago such as the mammoths giant sloths saber-toothed cats and others the cause of this mass extinction has been strongly debated over the years and there seemed to be two main ideas for what made it happen either it was the result of a changing climate that many of the megafauna were not able to adapt to quickly enough or it was due to humans over hunting many of the animals into extinction recent studies have shown a fairly strong link between a spread of early humans and the extinction of megafauna and so it seems quite likely that our species was responsible for many of the losses caused by this extinction event so what exactly were the animals that were dying off around this time one of these creatures was the woolly rhino a fairly massive species that was able to reach lengths of over three meters and looked quite similar to some of the more familiar Rhino taxa that are still around today obviously though the main feature that makes this animal stand out from its modern relatives is its shaggy fur coat this coat probably would have made these animals very important sources of clothing for early humans who likely could have constructed a great deal of warm clothes from the Rhinos evidence the humans did indeed tell these creatures or at least interacted with them can be found in incredible cave paintings that depict the woolly Rhino most of these creatures were sadly driven to extinction at the end of the last ice age about eleven thousand seven hundred years ago but it is possible that certain populations managed to survive until around 10,000 years ago however even if they did at this time in Earth's history they were a very rare soon to be completely extinct species another interesting animal that was dying off at around this time was the cave hyena this larger subspecies of hyena inhabited ancient Europe and Asia and they were fairly numerous throughout much of their time on earth these predators are known from bones found in caves that not only preserve hyenas but so the animals they were preying on such as the previously mentioned worried rhinos and wild horses terrifyingly these animals also probably hunted and killed early humans whenever they had the chance and they are also known to have taken their kills of Neanderthals as can be seen from bones that show evidence of the animals they belong to being eaten by both Neanderthals and cave hyenas the true cause of these animals extinction is not entirely understood but it seems to have coincided with the changing climate and environment that allowed other predators such as wolves and humans to have out competed these creatures into extinction over in North America there was the American cheetah a large feline slightly bigger than the modern shooter then habited the open plains of the continent despite this animals name it turns out that it might not actually have been a cheetah and it was more closely later to the modern-day puma evidence for this relationship comes from studies examining genetic information however even though the American cheetah was most likely not a cheetah it certainly looked very similar to modern ones and so probably lived a lifestyle very similar to them running at high speeds to chase down prey such as wild horses and deer this method of pursuit hunting would have caused an evolutionary convergence to occur with the anatomy of this Pima relative changing to look more like a Cheetahs these animals unfortunately ended up dying out about 10,000 years ago along with the other creatures I've mentioned once again either due to climatic changes that they were unable to adapt to or as they were forced into extinction by the spread of early humans of course one of the most well known of Ice Age animals is another kind of feeling the saber-toothed cats specifically Smilodon this large predator famous for the long canine teeth that project from its mouth inhabited the Americas during the Pleistocene before becoming extinct about 10,000 years ago in the mass extinction the cause of this animals disappearance is thought to have been due to his prey which were probably larger creatures such as bison and camels dying off in the megafauna extinction Smilodon seems to have become quite specialized to hunting these big bodied animals and once they were gone it's possible as small Don was simply unable to adapt to hunting the faster more agile Traven remained such as deer on the other hand if this was not the case then they likely fell prey to the changing climate or to the spread of humans which brought them into competition with our early relatives a fairly unique animal that unfortunately was also dying out around this time was the Cypress dwarf hippopotamus this tiny hippo was a little bit smaller than the still-living pygmy hippo with a length of about 120 centimeters and standing approximately 76 centimeters tall the shoulder the animal was confined to the island of Cyprus and through the process of insular dwarfism was able to achieve its small size and again sadly it seems that this species was most likely killed off once the first humans arrived on Cyprus and began hunting it causing it to disappear about 10,000 years ago another group of animals that ended up disappearing around this time were the ground sloths originating in South America about 35 million years ago and then eventually migrating into North America these animals grew too far larger sizes than those of their tree sloths relatives that are still around today the largest species of ground sloths Megatherium was an absolute giant reaching sizes comparable to modern elephants these huge herbivores were adapted to feeding on a variety of different plant material with each species seemingly suited to a different source of food the ground sloths were also using caves for something as many of their fossils have been found incredibly well-preserved in such locations with some specimens even preserving fur there are several theories as to why they might have used caves perhaps a shelter at night or to cool down during the day fossil bones from younger individuals have also been discovered in the caves so some paleontologists suspect that maybe they were used as a sort of nursery for juveniles giant ground sloths disappeared along with the other megafauna about 10,000 years ago and there certainly seems to be some correlation between the arrival of humans in certain areas and the extinction of the sloths however it's also possible that climate change played a large role in their disappearance - finally we couldn't exactly talk about Ice Age animals without including arguably the most famous of all the mammoths there were several species of mammoths that lived throughout the Pliocene employés to see but the woolly mammoths survived the longest with the majority of the species becoming severely reduced about 10,000 years ago although small populations on islands did manage to survive for a little long in the case of the Wrangell island mammoths they actually lasted until less than four thousand years ago before finally succumbing to extinction like the rest of their species the cause of the drastic decline of the species that occurred about ten thousand years ago is not entirely clear but again could have been due to shifting climatic conditions or human over hunting so there are a few of the unique animals that were around or just dying out ten thousand years ago obviously there were far more that were becoming extinct this time and many that had already died out sometime before ten thousand years ago it was clearly a changing world with the continued spread of our own species the changing climate and developments in technology this was the beginning of a very different earth compared to what it had ever been before well hopefully you enjoyed this rough overview of what was happening to our planet 10,000 years ago and found it interesting we just like to thank you all again for what you've done for the channel and getting it to where it is at the moment it really is incredible that it's grown so quickly we plan on continuing to upload twice a week for as long as we can and hopefully start covering some new topics that we haven't done before as well as of course sticking to our roots in paleontology and evolutionary biology we hope you'll continue to enjoy our videos and be sure to let us know how we can improve in the future as well as telling us what you enjoy seeing the most again thank you and we'll see you next week for some seven days of science [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Ben G Thomas

Views: 816,704

Rating: 4.7287359 out of 5

Keywords: Biology, Science, Paleontology, Palaeontology, Dinosaurs, Animals, Nature, Wildlife, Ben, Thomas, Prehistory, Anatomy, Fossil, Bones

Id: yXUzXbB9yJ0

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 01 2018