Humanity Before Neanderthals | Human Voiced, No Ads

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:01]In 2003, scientists deep inside a Spanish cave pulled out a skull with five separate fractures on the back of the head. Same weapon, multiple blows. There's no way this was an accident. This was murder. A murder committed 400,000 years ago. and one committed hundreds of thousands of years before Neanderthalss even existed.

[00:00:32]You see, there's a part of the human story that no one really talks about. We jump from early apes to Neanderthalss to us. It's as if the millions of years in between were just dead air.

[00:00:51]Well, they weren't. During that enormous stretch of time, our ancestors learned to walk. They invented stone tools. They tamed fire. They crossed continents.

[00:01:02]They built social lives complex enough to include both caregiving and, of course, murder.

[00:01:10]Far from the mindless creatures waiting for evolution to finish the job, they were resourceful. They were incredibly adaptive.

[00:01:21]and far more interesting than that blank space makes them out to be.

[00:01:27]So today we're going to talk about humanity, if we can use that term as broadly as we can, before Neanderthalss.

[00:01:37]And that goes back much further than you'd expect.

[00:01:41]First of all, welcome to the channel everyone. Good to have you with me. And thank you to everyone who liked, subscribed, commented, and uh supported the channel on Patreon, YouTube memberships, the merch store, and donations. Links are all in description.

[00:01:55]If you can't do any of that, well, just enjoy. Let's go.

[00:02:01]The story is more about gradual divergence, not dramatic transformation.

[00:02:08]sometime between 6 and 8 million years ago. Precise dates are still debatable with different genetic and fossil analysis producing slightly different results. The lineage that would eventually produce homo sapiens separated from that lineage that would eventually produce the chimpanzee and the bonobo, our closest uh cousins in the evolutionary scale.

[00:02:33]This divergence did not produce immediately or even quickly anything recognizable as a human being. What it did produce over millions of years was a series of creatures that shared some characteristics with modern humans and well some with other great apes and whose fossil remains have been the subject of intense study and frankly considerable controversy ever since the first significant discoveries in the late 19th century. Perhaps uh evolutionary and archaeological controversies are a video for a different time.

[00:03:11]there. I digress. Well, the earliest members of the human lineage, the homminins, as paleo anthropologists now call all members of the human family after the divergence from chimpanzees, are known primarily from East and Central Africa.

[00:03:27]Sahilanthropus Chadensis, discovered in Chad in 2001 and dated to approximately 7 million years ago, is the oldest candidate for homminin status.

[00:03:40]Though its classification is disputed and recent analysis of its limb bones of raised a few questions about whether it was genuinely bipedal is walking upon two legs.

[00:03:54]Orin Tuganensis from Kenya at approximately 6 million years ago and Ardopycus Kadaba doing my best with the uh latinized pronunciations here at approximately 5.8 8 million years ago.

[00:04:10]Complete the early picture of creatures that we can describe only in frankly uh frustratingly incomplete terms.

[00:04:21]probably walking upright at least some of the time with brains not substantially larger than a chimpanzees living in woodland environments where the distinction between tree dwelling and ground living was not yet as a sharp categorical difference at least uh not as sharp as it would become when things would uh even out a little bit uh in the evolutionary branches the oralopithesines The genus Oralopythecus and its relatives that is represent the next major chapter spanning roughly from 4 million to 2 million years ago and appearing across a wide range of East Asia and South African environments.

[00:05:08]Oralopythecus apherenis, the species to which these famous Lucy skeleton belongs, if you've ever heard of that big archaeological find, is best known for the being the top member of this group. Lucy, as it's called, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 by Donald Johansson's team, was a small female who stood about 1.1 m tall, walked upright on the ground, and had a brain roughly the size of a modern chimpanzee.

[00:05:40]She lived approximately 3.2 million years ago. The combination of fully bipeedal locomotion with an apesized brain, which Lucy and her species demonstrated, was one of the most important discoveries in the history of paleo anthropology.

[00:05:58]Because, for one reason, it completely demolished the prevailing assumption at the time that large brain size had driven the evolution of upright walking.

[00:06:09]Quick aside, from my understanding, it's not about the size of the brain, but rather the complexity of it. You know, the bumps on the brain are more important than the actual size. In any case, now the reverse was true. Our ancestors were walking on two legs long before their brains began to expand dramatically.

[00:06:30]The hands were freed before they had much knew to do with their freedom.

[00:06:37]Why bipedalism evolved at all? Well, that's a question that has generated an extraordinary volume of debate and a corresponding variety of proposed answers.

[00:06:49]The most widely accepted current view is that bipeedal locomotion was more energetically efficient than that knuckle walking for covering long distances on the ground. And that as East African environments became more open too, as the dense forest contracted and gave way to woodland and savannah mosaic during climate shifts during the late messene and pilline, creatures that could move efficiently on the ground over larger distance had quite a few more advantages in accessing food patches spread across a larger territory.

[00:07:26]But this explanation, however plausible as it sounds, is probably not quite there. It's a little incomplete.

[00:07:37]Bipedalism also frees the hands for carrying food, tools, and infants. It elevates the eyes above the grass. It makes heat regulation more efficient in open environments by reducing body surfaces exposed to direct solar radiation.

[00:07:55]And the evolution of bipedalism was almost certainly driven by multiple simultaneous advantages.

[00:08:02]The specific weighing of those advantages in any particular environment, that's where the variation is.

[00:08:11]But what matters for our story?

[00:08:14]Well, basically is that by 4 million years ago, give or take, of course, the human lineage had committed to upright walking in a way that was irreversible.

[00:08:29]You cannot turn the clock back anatomically on that once you're walking, you're walking. You don't really go back, don't you?

[00:08:37]and that this commitment was the most single most consequential physical development in hominin evolution.

[00:08:47]The oralopithesine period was not uniform. However, multiple species coexisted in Africa at various points occupying different ecological niches displaying different physical characteristics. The robust oustralopithesines, the paranthropus boisee in East Africa, paranthropus robustus in South Africa, developed massive jaws and grinding teeth, the suggested diet dominated by hard and fibrous plant material, and they appear to have been doing relatively well as a lineage for over a million years before eventually going extinct. All good things have to come to an end. I suppose their coexistence with the ancestors of the homo lineage tells us that homminin evolution was not a single progressive march toward modern humanity but a branching and experimenting one often simultaneously diversifying process in which many different adaptive solutions were tried and ultimately most of them failed.

[00:09:56]Well, the robust oustralopithesines are the most striking example of a homminin lineage that was genuinely successful by evolutionary standards and that while nevertheless went extinct, left no descendants.

[00:10:12]They are a reminder that the path to homo sapiens was not inevitable. It involved contingency and competition and extinctions and that a great many intelligent, capable, bipeedal creatures came into existence and disappeared without contributing really anything to our lineage at all.

[00:10:36]The most intimate physical trace of the Oralopithesine world is not a bone but a set of footprints at Leoli in Tanzania preserved in a layer of volcanic ash that fell approximately 3.66 million years ago and was subsequently covered by further deposits until its discovery in 1976.

[00:10:59]The footprints of two or three Oralopycus apherenis individuals are preserved in pretty extraordinary detail.

[00:11:07]They were walking upright side by side in a trackway that extends for approximately 27 m.

[00:11:16]The footprints are anatomically modern in their form. rounded heel and arch a divergent big toe in line with the other toes rather than pointing sideways as in a chimpanzee. Look up some chimpanzeee toes if you don't believe me.

[00:11:34]These are certainly the feet of a biped not one walking on what's the other what's the opposite? A quadriped. I believe that's a term. Now, the stridebat is essentially human. Two members of a species that would not be recognized as human by any other observer.

[00:11:53]Walked through a freshly fallen volcanic ash on a morning 3.66 million years ago, and the wet ash preserved their steps until we came along in 1976 and found them.

[00:12:08]There's nothing quite like the late holy footprints in the paleoanthropolog paleoanthropological excuse me record for making the distance between us and our ancestors feel suddenly well unexpectedly small.

[00:12:27]We're moving on. Sometime around 2.6 million years ago, something new appeared in the African landscape.

[00:12:36]deliberately shaped stone.

[00:12:40]The earliest stone tools belonging to what archaeologists called the older one industry are not really impressive objects by the standards of later tool making traditions.

[00:12:52]They consist primarily of cores cobbles from which flakes have been struck and the flakes themselves sharpedged pieces of stone whose cutting edge was the primary functional product of the napping process. It's napping with a KN.

[00:13:08]An older one flake tool held in the hand and drawn across a tendon or a hide would have been a pretty effective cutting instrument.

[00:13:18]Really the most effective you could get at the time.

[00:13:22]Producing one required the napper to understand the fracture mechanics of the stone to select the appropriate raw materials and to strike at the correct angle with the correct force to detach a flake of usable size and sharpness.

[00:13:39]Takes a little while to figure it out.

[00:13:41]It wasn't simple, but it was also not well by the standards of what came later sophisticated, but we can't all judge it by that.

[00:13:52]The species associated with the earliest older one tools is a matter of debate too. Homo habilus handyman named by Lewis Leaky and his colleagues in 1964 from fossils found at Oldi Gorge in Tanzania was the original candidate and it remains the most prominent member of the early homo genus in popular accounts. Homohabilis had a brain somewhat larger than the oralopythesines, approximately 600 cm compared to the orolopithesine range of f uh 400 to 550.

[00:14:30]The body also had proportions that were still somewhat ape like in length, at least in the arms relative to the legs.

[00:14:40]Whether it made older tools or whether the tools were made by a related species such as homo rudolor fences or even by late oustralopithesines that's not quite established yet what is established is that from approximately 2.6 6 million years ago, hominins in Africa were deliberately modifying stone to create cutting edges.

[00:15:06]And that this behavior represents a qualitative shift in the relationship between the human lineage and its material environment.

[00:15:16]The significance of stone tool manufacturer goes beyond the tools themselves.

[00:15:21]Making an older one tool requires quite a bit of planning. Selecting appropriate stone before you need it, carrying it to where it will be used, holding a mental model for the intended product through the process of manufacture.

[00:15:38]It requires the transmission of a learned skill across generations.

[00:15:43]Since naive production of sharp stone flakes is not intuitive and the knowledge of how to do it efficiently must be learned from observation and then practice.

[00:15:53]So it implies some form of social learning. There had to be some kind of mechanism by which the knowledge of a skilled nappa is communicated to the less experienced individuals.

[00:16:08]This does not require language in any developed sense. You could do it in a silent form. Chimpanzees transmit tool use behaviors through observation without anything resembling human language. But it does require a social structure in which skilled individuals can be observed by learners over sufficient time to acquire the relevant knowledge. The emergence of stone tool making was a social event as much as a technological one.

[00:16:38]The older one tools appear at sites across Africa by approximately 1.8 million years ago also in Asia and the caucuses carried by the first hominins to leave Africa.

[00:16:53]The timing and route of this first dispersal is one of the most actively studied questions in paleo anthropology to this day. the site of Dami in Georgia, the country Georgia, not the state, by the way, where remarkable fossils and old style tools have been found in sediment dated to approximately 1.85 million years ago represents the earliest well doumented homminin presence outside Africa.

[00:17:24]And the demoni homminins are significant for reasons beyond their age.

[00:17:31]They include individuals of varying size and skull shape that if found separately might have been classified as different species, but found together they suggest that a single highly variable population was present at this Eurasian outpost.

[00:17:50]One of the uh dumpi individuals was an old male who had lost all but one of his teeth long before death, meaning he had survived dependent on others for food that he could not chew for himself, for months, even possibly years.

[00:18:07]This is some of the earliest evidence for the social care of the infirm in the homminin record.

[00:18:14]Someone fed him. They had to. In a world without cooking to soften food, without agriculture to produce easily digestible staples, keeping an old man alive who couldn't really look after himself required deliberate effort from his companions.

[00:18:35]But if there is a single species that best represents that long middle chapter of human prehistory before the Neanderthalss, it is of course Homo erectus. A creature that appeared in Africa about 1.9 million years ago, spread across Africa, Asia, and possibly Europe over the following million years, and persisted in some populations until as recently as 117,000 years ago on the island of Jaba.

[00:19:05]It's in Indonesia, by the way.

[00:19:08]So, who was Homo erectus?

[00:19:11]Well, in terms of its geographic range, its temporal persistence, and the diversity of environments it successfully inhabited, it was the most successful homminin before Homo sapiens.

[00:19:26]Arguably more successful in terms of sheer duration.

[00:19:31]Think of it as the prototype, the very successful prototype of uh modern humanity.

[00:19:39]It is also the species most commonly described in popular accounts with language of startling condescension. You have words like, I don't know, primitive, archaic, caveman, this kind of thing. And that obscures the genuine sophistication of what was by any reasonable assessment a highly capable creature within its own environment.

[00:20:07]The physical characteristics of Homo erectus mark a significant departure from earlier hominins. The body proportions were essentially modern.

[00:20:17]long legs relative to arms, a narrow pelvis, a broad shouldered torso, suggesting a creature fully adapted to long distance walking and running in open environments.

[00:20:31]The brain was substantially larger than the early homo species, ranging from approximately 750 to 1250 cm across different populations and time periods, overlapping at the upper end with modern human brain sizes of 1,200 to,600 cm.

[00:20:53]The skull retained archaic features, heavy brow ridges, a sloping forehead, a prominent cranial ridge at the back of the skull. But in terms of the bodily form, the earliest homoerectus specimens from around 1.8 to 1.9 million years ago look quite a bit like us from the neck down and they look to their oropithesine predecessors.

[00:21:23]The tool making of Homo erectus is associated with the Arulian industry, a technological tradition that appears in Africa approximately 1.76 million years ago and is characterized above all by the handax a large bacially worked stone tool shaped on both faces to a symmetrical roughly teardrop or perhaps an oval form.

[00:21:50]The Archolian axe is one of the most discussed objects in the history of archaeology partly because its function is not entirely clear. It might have been used for butchering, maybe digging, woodworking.

[00:22:06]It might have been used as a sort of catch all for everything and partly because of the remarkable fact that the basic handax form was maintained with relatively little change across vast geographic distances and enormous spans of time. I mean, think about it. The tool is what it is. You go to the hardware store nowadays, Bunnings's Warehouse in Australia, or perhaps Home Depot for you Americans.

[00:22:37]You look at a handax that you get from the shop and you look at a prehistoric handax. It's in function and form pretty much the same thing. It's just we make them a little bit stronger and from different materials these days.

[00:22:56]Well, of course, this uh hand axe that have been found in the Arulian culture and those found in Europe and India, they're all separated by hundreds of thousands of years, but they look strikingly similar.

[00:23:13]This has been interpreted as evidence of cultural conservatism, as evidence that the form was constrained by functional requirements that didn't really allow for much variation.

[00:23:25]and as evidence that the handax had become so deeply embedded in Homoerectus' cognitive and behavioral repertoire that variation was suppressed by learning processes.

[00:23:37]Maybe, who knows? The debate continues, but that's what we uh it's the main consensus for now.

[00:23:45]Then there is the perhaps most consequential event in behavioral development in Neanderthal homminin history. The control of fire.

[00:23:57]That is something that is a little bit more difficult to pin down in terms of its origins. The earliest compelling evidence for the controlled use of fire come from sites in Africa dated to approximately a million years ago.

[00:24:12]Wonderwork cave in South Africa where burned bone and planned ash have been found in sediments of that age.

[00:24:20]Only a possible evidence exists at sites like Chesawa in Kenya.

[00:24:26]That's from about 1.4 million years ago and Swats in South Africa 1 to 1.5 million years. But the distinction between fire deliberately maintained by homonyins and fire produced by natural causes such as lightning strikes is not always so easy to establish from the archaeological record.

[00:24:47]What is clear is that by approximately a million years ago, fire was part of the repertoire of African hominins. And by 500,000 years ago, it was sufficiently widespread that hearths appear regularly in archaeological sites across Africa, Europe, and Asia.

[00:25:07]The consequences of fire control were transformative in ways that go beyond warmth and predator deterrence.

[00:25:15]Cooking dramatically increases the caloric yield of starchy plant foods and makes protein in meat and eggs more digestible, effectively giving the uh consumer more energy from the same amount of food.

[00:25:32]The biological anthropologist Richard Rangham has argued controversially but influentially that the adoption of cooking by early Homo drove the brain size increase and body form changes visible in Homo erectus because the extra calories available from cooked food provided the metabolic surplus needed to support a larger and more energetically expansive brain.

[00:26:00]Sounds good.

[00:26:02]Now of course this is not a democracy within science as we say the argument remains debated but the general principle that fire and cooking fundamentally altered the energetics of homminin life and thereby created new evolutionary possibilities is pretty much accepted by 99% of people.

[00:26:26]Little weird if you don't except that.

[00:26:30]Well, fire also extended the active hours of the day beyond sunset and that creates a bit of time for social interaction, communication, and the transmission of knowledge that would otherwise be lost to darkness.

[00:26:43]The evolutionary and social consequences of the campfire are difficult to overstate, which is why we made an entire video about fire, early man's relationship with it. You'll find it in the prehistory section on the playlist.

[00:27:01]The geographic persistence of Homo erectus deserves a moment's specific attention because it is one of the most remarkable facts in homminin evolutionary history.

[00:27:13]We are accustomed to thinking of homo sapiens as the uniquely widespread homminin, the species that colonized every continent. Conquer the world basically.

[00:27:25]But homoerectus which survived for approximately 1.8 8 million years as a species occupied an enormous geographic range all the way from Africa to the Caucuses to China and even the Indonesian archipelago in climates ranging from subtropical to temperate to cool conditions in northern China.

[00:27:48]The peaking man fossils, homoctus specimens found near Beijing in the 1920s and30s and since partly lost during the chaos of the Second World War, unfortunately came from a population that was living in northern China approximately 3 to 500,000 years ago, accumulating fire ash to depths, suggesting repeated occupation of the same cave over long periods and apparently hunting deer and large animals in a climate. it considerably colder than the tropical environments in which the lineage had originated in Africa.

[00:28:24]The adaptability of Homo erectus, its capacity to modify its behavior and its diet and probably social organization in response to different conditions was genuinely quite extraordinary.

[00:28:39]a necessary uh corrective to any assumption that behavioral flexibility is uniquely modern.

[00:28:49]Well, let's move on from uh Homo rectus.

[00:28:54]The Simma de loses pit of bones in the Atapa hills of northern Spain is one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in the world and the fossils recovered from it over decades of painstaking excavation represent the largest and most complete collection of pneandol homminin bones anywhere on earth.

[00:29:17]The site consists of a deep shaft in a cave system at the bottom of which the skeletal remains of at least 28 individuals have been found along with the bones of bears and other carnivores and significantly the most important thing a single beautifully made red quartzite hand axe. The only stone artifact among the thousands of bones.

[00:29:46]Pretty cool, huh? The handax, dubbed Excalibur by the excavators for the romantic quality of its isolation among the dead, is made from stone that does not occur naturally in that region. It must have been brought from some distance.

[00:30:05]It was only, oh, excuse me. It was the only manufactured object in the pit.

[00:30:11]Whatever its significance in the ritual or symbolic thinking of the people who put it there, it was not clearly an ordinary object.

[00:30:21]This one was special.

[00:30:24]The individuals from Simos lived approximately 400,000 years ago and are classified as Homohylebergensis.

[00:30:34]The species name given to a group of archaic homminins from Europe and Africa that represent the likely common ancestor of both Neanderthalss and modern homo sapiens.

[00:30:45]Homohylebergensis had a brain in the range of about 1100 to,400 cm substantially overlapping with modern human brain sizes combined with a skull that retained archaic features including large brow ridges and a low receding forehead.

[00:31:06]They were large-bodied, robust, and by the evidence of the Adabura fossils living in organized social groups with some capacity for what appears to be ritual or symbolic behavior.

[00:31:21]The deposition of the bodies in the pit, not scattered by carnivores or left where they fell, but specifically placed in a deep shaft, suggest that at a minimum the group was doing something deliberate with the dead. even if we cannot reconstruct exactly what they were doing.

[00:31:38]Now, the murder victim, one that we mentioned uh in the introduction, Skull 17, as he's called, is particularly significant because it implies not just violence, but a specific kind of premeditated violence. The repeated striking from behind with the same object suggests an intentional killing rather than an accident or the result of a fight which injuries accumulate randomly.

[00:32:06]This is not the first evidence of interomin violence in the fossil record.

[00:32:11]Earlier cases probate interpersonal violence have been identified with the orolopithithesine fossils in different places but it is among the most clearly documented and the context is important.

[00:32:26]The community that deposited bodies in the sim loses was the same community from which the killer and the killed came.

[00:32:36]The murder happened within a social group sophisticated enough to treat its dead with deliberate care and whose members were capable of both organized killing and organized mourning.

[00:32:50]The cognitive capabilities of homohybagensis are a matter of active research and considerable interest. The brain size alone does not really tell us much.

[00:33:03]Brain organization matters as much as brain volume and we cannot directly assess the organization of a 400,000year-old brain. It's uh a little bit sticky at this point, but the archaeological record associated with H Highleberg grade homminins in Europe and Africa provides indirect evidence of increasingly sophisticated behavior.

[00:33:30]Wooden spears. The Shoneningan spears found in Germany dated to approximately 300,000 years ago are the oldest wellpreserved wooden hunting weapons in the world and they were made by homminins of the H Highleberg grade.

[00:33:46]Eight spears in total were found alongside the butchered animal remains of over 20 horses at what appeared to have been deliberate hunting sites at the edge of a lake where horses came to drink.

[00:34:00]These are not opportunistic scavengers, but rather organized hunters coordinating to kill large and dangerous prey.

[00:34:08]The cognitive and social demands of coordinating big hunting expeditions, planning, communication, divisions of roles, the management of risk. That's pretty substantial. And the Shunning horses are evidence that those demands were being met.

[00:34:28]The box grove site in West Sussex, England, dated to approximately 480,000 years ago, provides a similarly detailed window into the H Highleberg's behavior.

[00:34:40]At Box Grove, the butchered animals of uh excuse me, the butchered remains of large animals, including rhinoceros, horse, giant deer, are found alongside beautifully made a hand axes in a context that suggests systematic butchery of carcasses acquired through hunting rather than scavenging.

[00:35:02]Cut marks on the bones appear before noring marks from carnivores, indicating that hominins had primary access to the carcass. They were there first.

[00:35:15]A homminin shin bone from Boxgroveve, the best preserved pneanderthal bone from Britain, shows carnivore noring marks suggesting that individuals remains were partially consumed after death, which it tells us about the risks of the environment rather than the funeral practices.

[00:35:34]The boss grove homminins were living in a landscape shared with lions, hyenas, wolves, all sorts of nasty animals in a climate that oscillated between temperate phases and cold periods.

[00:35:46]Hunting large animals and being hunted by large carnivores in a world that required constant competence to survive.

[00:35:57]One of the most important developments in the study of prenanderthal humanity in the past 20 years at least has been the emergence of ancient DNA analysis as a tool for understanding relationships between hominin populations.

[00:36:14]The first ancient genome sequencing of Neanderthalss completed by Svante Barau's team at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published in 2010 revealed that Neanderthalss and modern humans had interbred that approximately 1 to 4% of the DNA of non-African modern humans derives from Neanderthal ancestors.

[00:36:38]Now, this was quite significant.

[00:36:40]But even more remarkable came the discovery from a tiny finger bone found in the Denisova cave in the Alai Mountains of Siberia.

[00:36:52]The Dennisovans were identified not from fossils, but this time from DNA.

[00:36:59]The finger bone from Dennisova cave dated to approximately 50,000 years ago produced a genome that was clearly distinct from both Neanderthalss and modern humans. A separate lineage that had diverged from the Neanderthal lineage approximately 400,000 years ago deep in the pre- Neanderthal period we are discussing.

[00:37:19]subsequent discoveries, a few additional teeth and bone fragments and uh a remarkable hybrid individual whose mother was in the Anderthol and father of Dennisovven have confirmed that Denisovvens as a real and distinct homminin populations existed and Denosovven DNA has been found in modern human populations across Asia and into Melanesia in the Pacific. Now that shows that modern humans did interbreed with Dennisovvens when they migrated through Asia.

[00:37:53]The existence of the Dennisovvens identified from a fragment of bone no larger than a fingertip. Talk about a needle in a haystack finding that her transformed our understanding of the complexity of pine neanderthal and Neanderthal era homminin diversity.

[00:38:12]Before the Denisovven discovery, the standard model of late pistasine homminin diversity proposed two main lineages in Eurasia.

[00:38:20]Neanderthalss in the west, modern humans eventually replacing them. The Dennisovvens revealed that there was at least a third lineage in eastern Eurasia, coexisting with Neanderthalss in the west and apparently interacting with both Neanderthalss and modern humans at various points.

[00:38:41]Further ancient DNA analysis has suggested additional layers of complexity.

[00:38:47]There appears to have been at least one further as yet unidentified archaic human population that contributed DNA to modern Africans.

[00:38:58]And the history of interactions between different homminin lineages in the period of well between 600,50,000 years ago is a story of repeated contact, interbreeding and genetic exchange. One that symbol replacement models of earlier paleo anthropology had completely missed.

[00:39:22]That's the great thing about science. Uh it always changes.

[00:39:26]The genetic evidence has also illuminated the piethal period more directly.

[00:39:32]By analyzing the rate of genetic divergence between the Anderthal and modern human lineages, geneticists have estimated that these lineages separated between 500,000 and 800,000 years ago, placing the divergent point squarely in the error of Homohidlebergensis and helping confirm the interpretation of H Highlebergensus as the common ancestor of both subsequent lineages.

[00:40:00]What this means is that the population we met at the pit of bones, those 400,000year-old individuals from Atapa, were already members of a lineage that was diverging toward what would become the Neanderthalss, while their African contemporaries were members of a separate population diverging toward what would become modern humans.

[00:40:26]For 400,000 years, two sister lineages were developing in parallel on separate continents from the same archaic ancestor before their descendants would eventually meet again in the near east and briefly and consequentially interbreed.

[00:40:47]But the question that most people want answered about panderthal hominins is the one that's most difficult to answer.

[00:40:55]And that's a pretty general question.

[00:40:57]What were they like?

[00:41:01]Not in terms of their fossil morphology or their stone tool assemblages, but in terms of their inner lives, the social structures, the emotional experiences, capacity for thought and uh communication and self-awareness, things like that.

[00:41:18]Now, that question is genuinely hard because the aspects of mental life that most interest us leave no direct traces in the archaeological or fossil record.

[00:41:30]You can't really excavate a feeling, can't you? We cannot radiocarbonate a thought either. But what we can do is reason carefully from indirect evidence.

[00:41:41]We got things like u behavior ecology, anatomy, comparative biology.

[00:41:48]We can use those things and get toward a provisional conclusion that must always be held with the uh appropriate uncertainty.

[00:41:57]Bring out that uh salt again to give you a pinch of the social structure.

[00:42:03]Supanthal homminins were almost certainly organized around small mobile groups, bands of apps, 20 to 50 individuals who foraged together, cooperated, and uh maintained social relationships of the kind that all social primates maintain.

[00:42:22]The evidence for this comes partly from the comparison with living great apes and huntergatherer societies, partly from the scale of sites and the uh density of evidence for occupation and partly from specific patterns of tool use and resource exploitation.

[00:42:40]sites associated with H High Hidlebergensus grade uh hominins show evidence of repeated occupation of the same locations over long periods suggesting territorial patterns similar to those of modern huntergatherer groups.

[00:42:55]The investment in a location returning to the same water hole, the same shelter, a good hunting ground implies a spatial knowledge of the landscape. And that's something you got to build up over time, transmitted between generations, a kind of cognitive geography.

[00:43:14]The question of language is perhaps the most contested one in all of Paleo anthropology and is particularly fraught in the piethal period. The anatomical prerequisites for modern speech, the descended laryenth, the hyoid bone structure and neutral control of breathing necessarily for articulate speech are present in homo hyidleberensus fossils in forms that suggest some capacity for vocal communication and more sophisticated than that of other apes.

[00:43:46]But degree to which this capacity constituted language, if we're going to uh use that term in a spoken sense or in any meaningful sense, is impossible to determine from anatomy alone.

[00:44:01]The Fox P2 gene, which is involved in the neural control of fine motor movements, including those of speech, has the same modern human variant in Neanderthalss and presumably in Homohyensis, which their common ancestor would have possessed.

[00:44:18]This is suggestive of the evolutionary context in which language related neural architecture was being selected for, but it doesn't really tell us what was being said.

[00:44:30]Just hints I'm afraid. If that you're lucky if you get them. The behavioral evidence for pinanderthal cognitive sophistication is in some cases quite striking. The oldest known ochre processing grinding of red iron oxide into pigment which in the last video I kept pronouncing as okra and everybody told me I'm for it. So here I am correcting myself. comes from the wonderwork cave in South Africa and other sites dated to over a million years ago associated with homoerectus grade homins.

[00:45:07]Okchre is not a food. It doesn't have an obvious utilitarian function and it requires deliberate effort to process.

[00:45:17]Its use is generally interpreted as evidence of symbolic or decorative behavior. The marking of bodies, objects, or surfaces with color, which implies a capacity for symbolic representation that most researchers believe was absent or minimal in earlier homonyms, and that developed gradually through the period we are discussing.

[00:45:39]The oldest known engraving, a zigzag pattern insized on the shell from the trenil site in Java, associated with Homo erectus and dated to approximately 500,000 years ago, pushes the evidence for geometric marking back further than most researchers had expected.

[00:45:58]The evidence for the care of the sick and injured, while paleo anthropologists sometimes call the care for the helpless, is one of the most humanly resonant aspects of binthal behavior, and it appears earlier in the record than is often appreciated.

[00:46:16]The toothless old man from Dami, who had survived months without teeth, is one example. At the Simma de losos, there is a young individual with a severe cranial deformity. Cranio, hang on, let me take this one slow.

[00:46:34]Cranioinostosis.

[00:46:38]Excuse me. The premature fusion of skull sutures that would have caused significant cognitive impairment and physical limitation. He would have needed help, too.

[00:46:51]This individual survived to at least five or 6 years of age in a world where the cognitively uh cognitively impaired and physically limited are easy targets for Voke predators and social exclusion.

[00:47:04]Someone had kept this kid alive, fed the kid, protected it. The child contributed nothing to the group's survival. The group contributed substantially to the child's.

[00:47:18]This is not a behavior explained by individual selection. It is a behavior that requires social bonds of a kind that we recognize as specifically human.

[00:47:32]But one of the most important lessons of prenanderthal paleo anthropology is that the history of human evolution is consistently more complex, surprising, and less linear than any model proposed at any given moment has managed to predict.

[00:47:48]The most dramatic demonstration of this principle in recent decades was the discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 of the skeletal remains of a homminin species that nobody had anticipated and uh well still in important respects we're trying to fully understand it.

[00:48:09]The species, formerly designated Homo Floresensus and nicknamed the Hobbit in popular accounts for reasons that will be uh immediately obvious, was approximately 1 m tall, had a brain roughly the size of a grapefruit, around 380 cm, comparable to a chimpanzeee, by the way, and appears to have been making stone tools and possibly using fire on the island of Flores until as recently as 50,000 and years ago.

[00:48:41]The Hobbit's existence raised immediate and still partially unresolved questions about its origins, cognitive capabilities, and the mechanisms that produced it.

[00:48:52]The leading hypothesis is that Homofluiansis is a dwarfed descendant of Homo erectus.

[00:49:00]That a population of Homo erectus that reached Flores probably during a period of lower sea levels where you had land bridges and all that subsequently underwent island dwarfism.

[00:49:14]the wellocumented evolutionary process by which large mammals on islands tend to evolve towards smaller body size over generations because smaller bodies require fewer calories on resource limited habitats. And uh if you've watched our video on mammoths, by the way, you know about that little island of mammoth holdouts that were quite a bit smaller.

[00:49:38]It happens with all species.

[00:49:41]The alternative hypothesis that homo floresensus descended from a more primitive hominin than homoerectus possibly an oralopithesine grade ancestor that reached Southeast Asia at a very early date has fewer adherence but has not been definitively eliminated.

[00:50:02]What is not contested is that Homo Floresensus, whatever its ancestry, was making stone tools and possibly cooperating in the hunting of dwarf elephants on a remote island in the Indonesian archipelago until shortly before modern humans arrived in the region.

[00:50:20]The hobbit is the most dramatic example of a broader principle. The homminin family tree of the period before Neanderthalss was not a simple progression of grades moving steadily toward modern human form, but rather a genuinely diverse radiation of species occupying different environments and pursuing different adaptive strategies, some of which led to forms that violate every expectation formed by linear models of progress.

[00:50:53]The smallrained smallbodied islanders of flores coexisted in time on neighboring islands with homo sapiens.

[00:51:03]The homo erectus survived in Java until 117,000 years ago, overlapping in time with both Neanderthalss and early modern humans. The denoshovvens were present in Siberia simultaneously with Neanderthalss in Europe and possibly even homoerectus populations in China.

[00:51:23]The Pin Neanderthal Wall was not a rehearsal for modern humanity.

[00:51:29]It was a rather world densely populated with different kinds of people and most of them left no descendants.

[00:51:39]The most recently discovered homonyin species homo lady found in a uh South African cave system called the rising star cave in 2013 and 17 adds another layer of surprise. Homo nady had a mixture of primitive and modern features that defied easy classification.

[00:52:00]A tiny brain of approximately 465 to 610 cm combined with feet and legs adapted for upright walking. Hands with curved fingers suggesting some tree climbing and a face more modern in some features than expected for its brain size.

[00:52:22]Dating of the fossils produced an astonishing result. Homo Nalady was alive between 236 and 335,000 years ago. Contemporary with early homo sapiens in Africa, contemporary with Neanderthalss in Europe, and contemporary with denosovvens in Asia.

[00:52:45]A species with a brain roughly one-third the size of a modern humans was alive at the same time as early modern humans in the same continent. and the context in which its bones were found. Deep in a cave system, accessible only through passages so narrow that the excavators had to be specifically selected for small body size, suggest deliberate deposition of the dead, which would represent mortuary behavior in a species whose brain size most researchers would not have associated with behavior like that.

[00:53:20]The modern human lineage, i.e. Direct ancestors of Homo sapiens spent most of the pneanderthal and Neanderthal periods in Africa. They spent their time developing, diversifying, and gradually accumulating the behavioral repertoire that would distinguish them anatomically and behaviorally from modern humans and all previous hominins.

[00:53:45]The transition to anatomically modern humans defined primarily by skull shape, the rounded highd cranium and flat face of a modern homo sapien appears in the African fossil record at approximately 300,000 years ago with the Jibel earhod fossils from Morocco currently the oldest well-dated examples. But anatomically modern humans and well behaviorally modern humans did not arrive together and the relationship between them is uh still quite a debatable topic of course in paleo anthropology.

[00:54:23]The behavioral characteristics associated with fully modern humans. The production of symbolic objects body ornaments of abstract art of longd distanceance trade in raw materials.

[00:54:35]complex projectile weapons, things like that. They all appear in the African archaeological record in rather scattered and episodic forms from about 300,000 years ago, gradually becoming more consistent and widespread through the period from 160 to 70,000 years ago and then erupting with apparent suddeness across the record associated with the out of Africa dispersal system that brought modern humans to Europe and Asia. approximately 70,000 years ago.

[00:55:11]The apparent suddeness of this behavior has led some researchers to propose a cognitive revolution, a neurological change perhaps involving a reorganization of language circuits that transformed human cognitive capacity in a relatively brief period maybe. But others also argue that the behavioral evidence was always more sporadic than this model requires and that the expulsion or rather the explosion, excuse me, of symbolic behavior reflects demographic and social changes, larger and better connected populations, things like that, rather than just this uh click of the fingers, neurological transformation.

[00:55:54]Well, let's say click of the fingers, but yeah, a click that uh appears over several dec uh several tens of thousands of years, things like that. What the long African prehistory of homo sapiens demonstrates, however long the behavioral transition is explained, is that the lineage that produced modern humans was shaped by millions of years of the evolutionary processes that we've been discussing throughout today's talk. The upright walking of the oralopythecus developed 4 million years ago. The stone tool making of the homohabilis related species began 2.6 million years ago. The fire control that homoerectus was practicing a million years ago. The organized hunting and social complexity of the homo hidleensus displayed at Boxgrove in Shaingan and the Sema de loses.

[00:56:52]the care of the injured and helpless, the ogre pigment, uh the geomet geometric engravings.

[00:57:01]It's all these things, all these developments that belong to the long accumulation of capacity that eventually produced a species capable of art, language, agriculture, and space travel.

[00:57:14]Who knows what we're capable next? All the other lovely things that homo sapiens have done with their evolutionary legacy they inherited.

[00:57:25]We didn't invent ourselves. We were built slowly, contingently by 4 million years of ancestors, ones that we've almost entirely forgotten.

[00:57:44]So what do you think that pianderthal world it does have a legacy in the most literal sense biological of course lives within the very body that uh you are listening to this talk in right now the very vehicle that your mind and soul inhabits the genes that determine our upright posture large brains capacity for fine motor control all Those little things they were shaped by the evolutionary processes of the period we've been discussing.

[00:58:19]We did not uh get here by accident. I suppose there was many steps that had to be taken.

[00:58:27]The product of millions of years of different reproductive successes in environments that no longer exist.

[00:58:35]solving problems that are no longer our problems under pressures whose nature we can only partially reconstruct.

[00:58:45]So all of this is fundamental to understanding our own self-nowledge.

[00:58:52]Perhaps we can go into the mirror, take a good look at ourselves and say, "Well, so this is what I've become."

[00:59:03]Anyway, thank you all for listening. I had a good time. More prehistory videos to come soon because I find them particularly fascinating.

[00:59:15]And uh if you're still listening, I assume you do as well, unless you're listening out of pure spite, which you'd be surprised.

[00:59:26]Anyway, good night everybody. Thank you for joining me and I will see you next time.

[00:59:32]Kiss, kiss, hug, hug. Farewell for now.