A Hominins timeline to help put things in perspective:
7-6 million years ago: Possible divergence of the lineage leading to humans from the lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos (our closest living relatives).
Ardipithecus kadabba (~5.8-5.2 million years ago)
Ardipithecus ramidus (~4.4 million years ago)
Australopithecus anamensis (~4.2-3.9 million years ago)
Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) (~3.9-2.9 million years ago)
Kenyanthropus platyops (~3.5 million years ago)
Australopithecus africanus (~3.3-2.1 million years ago)
Paranthropus aethiopicus (~2.7-2.3 million years ago)
Australopithecus garhi (~2.5 million years ago)
Paranthropus robustus (~2-1.2 million years ago)
Homo habilis (~2.1-1.5 million years ago)
Homo rudolfensis (~1.9 million years ago)
Homo ergaster/Homo erectus (~1.9 million years ago - ~143,000 years ago)
Paranthropus boisei (~1.7-1.1 million years ago)
Homo heidelbergensis (~700,000-300,000 years ago)
Homo naledi (~335,000-236,000 years ago)
Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals) (~400,000-40,000 years ago)
Denisovans (around 300,000-50,000 years ago)
Homo sapiens (modern humans) (~300,000 years ago to present)
Oldowan industry - simple flaked stone tools (~2.9-1.7 million years ago)
Acheulean industry - advanced tools like hand axes (~1.7 million - ~160,000 years ago)
Archaic humans in Southeast Asian islands like Indonesia (~1.8-1 million years ago, dating is a bit uncertain on this one)
First control of fire (~1 million - ~700,000 years ago)
First archaic humans living in colder climates like Atapuerca, Spain (~800,000 years ago)
First wooden spears denoting a change in hunting tech (~400,000 years ago)
Widespread control of fire (~400,000 years ago)
==> First homo sapiens <== (~300,000 years ago)
First neanderthals arrive in Europe (~230,000-150,000 years ago)
First use of ochre pigment for symbolic purposes (~190,000 years ago)
Body lice genetically diverge from head lice due to clothing (~170,000 years ago)
Mousterian industry - points, scrapers, denticulates, notches, and awls (~300,000-40,000 years ago)
First time eating seafood at Pinnacle Point (~150,000 years ago)
Humans start collecting and using shell beads (~130,000 years ago)
First heat treated material - silcrete (~110,000 years ago)
First compound adhesive leads to tar-hafted tools (~100,000 years ago)
First bed (~77,000 years ago)
First bow and arrow in Sibudu (~72,000–60,000 years ago)
Arrival in Australia (and thus first boat?) (~70,000-65,000 years ago)
First musical instrument (flute) (~60,000 years ago)
First burial ritual at Shanidar Cave (~60,000 years ago but controversial)
First sewing needle (~45,000 years ago)
Aurignacian industry - true homo sapien tools like microlithics, blades, projectile points, pressure flaking, split-base bone points (~43,000-26,000 years ago)
Gravettian industry - Bow and arrow, harpoons, and darts come into their own (~33,000-22,000 years ago)
Solutrean & Magdalenian industry - flint tools, cave art, etc. (~22,000-12,000 years ago)
Disclaimer: "First [...]" means "oldest surviving evidence of [...]". I tried my best to select a realistic middle ground age but each one has error bars of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of years and there's a lot of overlap in industries.
It has been said that if a modern "average" human were transported back in time, it would be difficult for that person to build anything useful, because of the lack of material manufacturing (c.f. "Toaster from Scratch" and "Primitive Technology" channels) and lack of specific knowledge.
So goes my thought experiment. If I were transported 100,000 years back, I would big-scale industrialize the production of soap blocks and then build soap distribution networks over wast lands (the King of Soap). Soap is quite easy to produce with wood ash.
I would also mass-scale press-print porno comics (using wooden plate carvings).
I think these two what defines civilization and will give me a chance for not being killed as a practitioner of witchcraft.
1. Try selling soap blocks and porno comics to an Amazon tribe or Australian native. Do they have "sell"? Do they need soap blocks? Do they need porno comics? It’s very narrow how you paint it.
2. Behavioral modernity in humans including the way we use language is thought to have emerged 70000-55000 years ago. You can’t go further back and expect to be understood.
3. Humans keep changing. The domestication of the dog ca. 28000-26000 years ago also changed the human brain by turning the dog into our wild senses.
4. Humans self-domesticated themselves the past 6000 years. Human brains show the same changes that domesticated cows have versus wild cattle species. Have you noticed that you can stay in a room with 50 strangers and not attack or sexually assault anyone? This same change led to the development of civilizations.
5. Your thought experiment only really makes sense if you go the furthest, say 12000 years back. Trade might not make sense to humans before.
6. Humans still keep changing.
7. Culture is more diverse than you think. By far more diverse. Just an example: Among human tribes across the globe 40% practice kissing, 60% never kiss. Your concepts will not translate.
I question a lot of the info in comment. Specifically the “humans domesticated themselves 6000years ago.” We had characteristics of “domesticating ourselves” long before 6000 years ago. Non-pronounced canines, reduced sexual dimorphism between males and females, are all hallmarks of a transition from a mating system that was “tournament based” (one male wins all the females) to a more pair-bonded species, although it’s a spectrum and humans have behavior related to both.
This was probably co-evolving with the cost of raising a human child. Which we didn’t just magically start doing 6000 years.
Classic example of the bullshit asymmetry principle, where it took me two paragraphs of text to reasonably dispute a one sentence off hand, inaccurate comment
Two notes on language and self-domestication:
- 77kya is very late for the emergence of language (though how far it can be traced is still object of heavy debate and nuance). The tenuous consensus nowadays is that the last common ancestor with the Neanderthal/Denisovan branch had at the very least a partial capability of language. 'Behavioral modernity' is also a bit of a red herring on its own, in light of discoveries like this and how similar Neanderthals were to us in terms of archaeological record.
- Re self-domestication... The concept is very messy and disputed (I've largely given up on its usefulness, in fact). But in any case 6kya is too late, simply because all modern humans are prosocial, as parent comment said.
Source: human evolution PhD, I have worked in faculty of language evolution, prosociality, genetic basis for self-domestication.
Am I right that the common ancestor of sapiens and Neanderthals and Denisovans is -800kya?
And what about the following strong differences between sapiens and Neanderthals/Denisovans: musical instruments, cave paintings, projectile weapons?
I found that the basis has to be there from a long time ago, and one branch makes use of it. The lungfish has limbs, but only some branches of it went terrestrial. An old human ancestor had language capabilities but only some branches used it. Dinosaurs had feathers but only some used it for gliding and flight.
Can you comment on the shrinking brain size that’s observed among humans in the past few thousand years?
Strong differences: it's not so clear these are "strong", for a couple reasons:
1. The archaeological record has disputed some of those claims: spears are supposed to have been part of the hunting repertoire of Neanderthals [1], there are some claims regarding musical instruments (personally I'm skeptical) [3], and cave paintings [2] basically resemble what sapiens where doing about that time, which is just... not very impressive in general.
2- A much more interesting question is hiding in plain sight. It's not as much "did Neanderthals do X or Y relative to what sapiens are known to be capable of?", but rather: "given enough time, could Neanderthals or Denisovans have painted something like the Lascaux cave paintings?". Or, rather: did all these extinct humans species have the same capability for cultural ratcheting, ie transmitting and refining knowledge, that we have proven to have? Sapiens needed a lot of time to create some of our most representative "representative art", let alone other cultural innovations. On the other hand, if there were any differences in capability, what were their nature? What are the implications for language?
Re the basis: for sure! Some of the innate physical and neurological basis for language have been in place for a long time. Which pieces where co-opted, modified or appeared de novo when and for what is the interesting part. Having only the archaeological record and the DNA of these species, it's a hell of a problem.
As for the shrinking brain size: as far as I know there is some doubt about the universality or significance of this claim. It could be due to agricultural diet changes, or holocene climate fluctuations. It also coincides with population size increases, so mutations allowing more efficient brains or just regular old drift are possible. Honestly, I can't say I have a strong opinion on it.
Any thoughts on the tech & culture timeline I provided above? I'm by no means an expert - or even an armchair archaeologist for that matter - so it's difficult to keep track of the age estimates as they evolve.
The changes in the field have done nothing but accelerate and it feels like there's a new development every other week at this point.
Maybe I'd add to this the first engraving by erectus [1] (~500kya) because people tend to forget about it but I think it's quite significant. Other than that, it looks great! I also have a hard time keeping track of every new discovery, specially as I got out of academia. Amazing time to work in human evolution.
Soap actually increases his chance of survival in this scenario. Clean wound == less chance of infection.
Explaining what soap does and why people should value it would be the real challenge. Communication in general would need to be built from scratch. No english, no latin languages, no modern gestures like thumbs up and hand shakes, no common ground.
Depending on the era, I would bet on agriculture and fermentation as my empire-building tech. Wine first, then bread which is a little bit harder. Maybe spices also, I heard some pretty large empires were built on the power of funny flavors.
It's kind of funny that you think you would be able to produce wine 100,000 years ago. Do you know what grapes used to look like back then? Well, they were absolutely not the giant balls of sweetness we see today :D. They became that after thousands of years of selection by humans. Which first had to "invent" agriculture, which was not easy and it's still quite unclear whether the earliest civilizations that adopted it were better off until they actually became capable of creating large city-states which could then go on to dominate all their neighbours and started accumulating power.
So, 100,000 years ago you would need to convince people to join you in this crazy agriculture thing without any metal tools.... without domesticated animals either, by the way... as that would still be thousands of years in the future...
Finally, just taking a large amount of food and leaving it for a long time to ferment somewhere well protected, while everyone around is hungry, would be a huge challenge already. You might need to protect it both from people and from very large wild animals that had not gone extinct yet and would love to take that food from you (and likely use you as food also).
It doesn't need to be fine wine from the best grapes. It doesn't even need to be from grapes. The first beers were murky, slurry and not cold and people loved it.
I can convince my first followers by doing the first crops and batches myself, alone.
Usage of animals and metal tools in agriculture came much later. I don't need that to start. I just need fire and ceramics.
Of course it wouldn't be _easy_. Empires are never easy.
Ultimately, what I'm saying is the context of the original comment about soap: food tech would be more succesful than soap tech.
Elderberry would be my choice - it has medicinal properties as well as being an enjoyable flavour, it's essentially unchanged in the history that we've known of it (5000 years), so wine production techniques won't have to change much, and it's a fairly fast growing tree/shrub so building up a large orchard won't be a big deal.
Sexual control and restriction is a pretty widespread feature of premodern cultures. I think you should stick to the soap. The porno is probably trouble.
Something very evocative is the resemblance to Neanderthal cave engravings (@16:45 in the video) - that same theme of cross hatching, with multiple length verticals. As Lee points out, ascribing meaning to these things is going to be pretty much impossible, but it's very evocative. Could it be a family portrait? A warning? The 300k BC version of a Biohazard sigil? A Homo Sapiens band, hunting them into the depths of the earth? Who knows.
"Scientists have finally decoded the meaning of the homo naledi engravings... they say the best translation is: 'This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.'"
The news is that homo naledi did these things at the same time as humans despite a much smaller brain size, contradicting the social brain hypothesis somewhat. Their cranial capacity was 465-610 cubic cm compared to about 1,300 for humans [1].
If humans were around at the same time as homo naledi, how do they know that it was homo naledi? Couldn't a random human just wander in one afternoon and make the marks?
They can't know that for certain! See Lee Berger's announcement video [1] for a discussion. Paraphrasing the slide:
There is no evidence of *homo sapiens* use or presence beyond the light zone of the cavern system
Cultural context: there are *homo nadeli* graves in the cave system with the drawings
Access to the cavern system has not changed and would have been much easier for the smaller *homo nadeli* (Lee Berger had to lose 55 pounds to fit into the caves)
The burials and drawings were made over a long period of time, implying an ongoing settlement
The evidence for *homo nadeli* burials meets or exceeds that accepted for ancient *homo sapiens* burials
That last bit is the most interesting one. Since there are almost no fluvial or geological changes in the cavern system over hundreds of thousands of years, the graves of the homo nadeli are much better preserved than ancient homo sapien graves. By comparing the layers of dirt in the grave and the rest of the cave system, they can determine to a high degree of certainty that it was in fact a purposeful burial instead of a random "body in a hole".
I still don't understand how burials indicate how it was Homo Nadeli who made the marks. All it would take is a single human (maybe some teenagers) wandering down one afternoon on a lark and making the marks.
Having read his "Almost Human" book... these are not caves you casually enter. The passages to get to the Naledi burial chambers are impassable to adult males and most women, and are very deep and far in the cave system. He specifically recruited petite women with caving experience to work on his projects.
"A portion of the cave, used by the excavation team en route to the Dinaledi Chamber, is called "Superman's Crawl" because most people can fit through only by holding one arm tightly against the body and extending the other above the head, in the manner of Superman in flight"
That makes it even more likely it could have been humans, doesn’t it? Over a long period of time, probably lots of humans wandered deeper into the cave.
Now I'm picturing two cave dwelling fellows in front of a fire knapping flint and shooting the shit, and one goes "hold on, what about cave paintings... as a service!"
From just scrubbing through the video it seems like there’s none of the usual evidence they were done by humans in the cave, I guess like random other trinkets or items? The cave is super super small, and if I understood correctly it was also a burial ground for Homo naledi.
They’re not terribly sophisticated markings, or obviously social. Even if brain size correlates exactly with capability, doing these at ~40% brain size seems quite plausible.
Brain size in modern humans is also only weakly correlated with intelligence [1]. So they might not even have been stupid due to their smaller brain size.
Sperm whales don't have much of a chance to manipulate their environment, but they have the largest brains on earth [2].
(dang would have moved your comment as title-change comments get pinned to the bottom of the list when resolved, so this gives your useful comment better visibility)
You took the trouble to italicize the binomial, but didn't capitalize the generic name, whereas the OP's title failed to not capitalize the species epithet.
I wonder how society would behave if those homonids were still around today.
A lot of society norms are based on our intelligence levels being remarkably approximately equal across all of our species. What if there existed a bunch of beings on Earth that were somewhere in-between a human and a monkey in intelligence, cognitive, and language abilities?
Would they go to school and be a part of the economy and job market, but with some kind of "no hominid left behind" program? Or would they be pets and get free food and rent in return for being cute? Or would they have their own hamlets and kingdoms and fight with our high-tech cities and countries?
Frankly, they'd either be exterminated, or slaves.
Extermination is likely because humans generally don't like competition. Just look at all the other apex predators/megafauna that have disappeared (or practically so) when humans showed up.
Otherwise, humanity's extensive history of slavery of anything we can de-humanize would apply to any survivors.
I can see the argument that it's definitionally impossible to enslave someone without dehumanizing them, if you believe that certain inalienable freedoms are part of being human, and thus you cannot take them away from someone without dehumanizing them.
But if by "dehumanization" you really mean "racist," then yes indeed, slavery was originally based more on generic power imbalances (prisoners of war, or offspring of existing slaves) than any racial component. The racist aspect of slavery only became prominent with the emergence of colonialism and exposure of Europeans to "the new world." I'm not sure that race was even an attribute that the ancients felt worthy of mentioning - after all, Rome was an empire spanning many disparate races and cultures. Wikipedia [0] seems to agree ("skin tones did not carry any social implications"). I'd be curious to read more about it though.
> I'm not sure that race was even an attribute that the ancients felt worthy of mentioning
> Wikipedia [0] seems to agree ("skin tones did not carry any social implications")
When I read this comment (before your edit), I was a bit surprised, since ethnicity and "blood/familial" relations were absolutely huge in ancient Rome.
I generally use a definition of race that's much broader than skin tone, and I see it as interchangeable with loosely defined ethnicity and cultural background.
Oh they definitely had enslavement from birth. But generally the original reason for enslaving the parents/grandparents was because they were a prisoner of war, or ended up on the wrong end of some power imbalance - it's unlikely they were enslaved for any reason directly related to their physical attributes like skin tone.
(I guess you could argue that an empire that invaded another culture/nation/territory and then enslaved its people was effectively enslaving them based on something akin to "race," but that argument is slightly weakened by the fact that the Roman army didn't only conquer "barbarians" but also went to war against their contemporary civilizational peers, often driven by familial disputes between emperors.)
So while enslaving someone from birth is undoubtedly bad, I'm not sure it's fair to characterize it as enslavement based on racial attributes, if the slave's ancestor was originally enslaved for reasons unrelated to race. Like, I guess you could call it racism if you squint, but only in the sense that skin color (or whatever other physical attributes you might associate with race) is an inherited characteristic, which seems like self-referential reasoning.
Ah yeah, thinking about it a little more carefully, I see your point, especially on the topic of slavery.
Although the ancient Romans were absolutely big on ethnic/racial discrimination, the specific institution of slavery was not based on this. And their strong sense of the rule of law allowed for more civic forms of discrimination. For example, Germanic peoples weren't enslaved because they were non-Italian. They were just denied citizenship and its privileges, etc.
Arguably the specific form of racist dehumanization and invention of race itself came about as ideological justification for an already existing slave practice.
e.g. the Romans kept slaves on a huge scale, but never bothered with a racist ideology to justify it. They just dehumanized almost anyone, their ethical system permitted blatant "might makes right." But the nominally Christian ethical system predominant in our most recent western society required a "reason" why slavery was permissible, and so we got the invention of race.
This whole idea of classifying by intellectual ability, or even thinking we can measure it along some single axis... is going to look mighty quaint once our machines truly and fully surpass us on that axis.
Wouldn't it be nice if Neanderthal, Erectus, Denisovan and Naledi was with us today but we didn't see them as "stupider forms of us" but "intelligent in different way"?
My two border collies are clearly less "intelligent" than me on something like the axis I refer to above. But holy crap do they have better physical / situational awareness; their minds are incredibly sharper than mine for what's happening in terms of motion, sound, smell, etc. and they surely get as much or more pleasure/stimulation out of running through my field after a rabbit or frisbee than I do writing Rust or making comments on hackernews...
I was talking to my son in the car last night about this -- in and around the whole world of "races" (elves, dwarves, etc.) in Tolkien-esque fantasy novels, D&D, Dwarf Fortress, etc. In a way this is almost like a fantastical projection of a world where other Hominin species co-exist.
Our yearning for fantastical elves to live along side us might actually be a feeling of loneliness knowing that we are the only species of our kind left.
> but we didn't see them as "stupider forms of us" but "intelligent in different way"
> My two border collies are clearly less "intelligent" than me on something like the axis I refer to above
I very much agree with intelligence being multidimensional and that humans are largely similar in general intelligence level, just that everyone has different intelligences.
I'm not sure that's true of a different species though. Intelligence is the evolved trait of homo sapiens. I wouldn't call a baboon, rattlesnake, or jellyfish "intelligent but in a different way". Those creatures have other evolutionary reasons for success, but not intelligence.
If you're interested in alternate history and have a login for alternatehistory.com, there's an incomplete but moderately good write-up of exactly this.
Not quite the same but we do actually have populations of people with significantly reduced capacities, such as those with Down's Syndrome. I'm not sure how it is everywhere but in Western Europe there's generally quite a bit of effort put in by families, carers, charities and businesses to give them a sense of life in society.
If we look at the origins of major groups of animals, the first dinosaurs or at earliest stages of bird evolution, we see often see multiple related groups evolving convergently due to similar pressures. My favorite example of this is that powered flight may have been acquired three or more times in closely related but distinct groups of theropod dinosaurs.
When we think of the other branches of the Human family tree, we often think of them as sort of diverging from our ancestors and then freezing unchanged. However, it would not at all be surprising if the pressures which so aggressively favored increased intelligence in our ancestors also applied to all our "cousins".
That’s exactly right - I want to give another example: Squamates want to develop a legless body. Snakes have emerges, but there are also legless geckos, legless lizards etc, etc.
The thing is that normally the change happens in the speciesation first and then these traits are used for something distinctive - dinosaurs grew feathers first, and then used them for flight. Humans grew intelligence first, and then used it for civilization. The resource has to be already there to be used. The resource will not be developed by evolution. The lungfish already had limbs and joints (while living purely aquatically), thus it could use it to walk outside the water.
What is interesting is how thoroughly Homo sapiens sapiens displaced all other hominids.
It seemed in the past, intelligence was more of a gentle curve. Now, you have Homo sapiens sapiens with planes, rockets, global communications, rockets, satellites, and then every other species. The most sophisticated modern non-human primate doesn’t seem to rise to the level of intelligence and sophistication ago even early hominids.
There was a shift in how the word 'hominid' was used around the 1990s, largely due to the introduction of genetic classification if I understand correctly. Hominids (humans and close ancestors) used to be considered distinct from Pongoids, which were basically all other great apes including chimpanzees and bonobos. That taxonomy was retired, and all great apes are now considered hominids.
There's little evidence of ground stone tools until very recently [1], like tens of thousands of years ago. It wasn't until agriculture that the technology became widespread.
Knapping [2] - which has been around for over 3 million years at this point - is much more predictable and efficient than grinding while requiring less intuitive knowledge of the materials. Paleolithic people just didn't have the resources to experiment with enough materials to figure out hardness, grain size, etc. for proper grinding.
If you look at the video some of the patterns are very regular and geometric, not what I'd expect for a regular sharpening of a tool. It's possible they sharpened tools artfully but then that's just a different way of creating the inscriptions.
What kind of language did they have?
The signs could be just signpost for a location "look for the rocks with the straight incisions"...but they would need some way to comunicate that to each others.
It seems likely to me that meaning-making, like consciousness, is on a sliding scale across all life. So trying to find the first homonids that "had it" seems futile.
“Homo sapiens” are hybrid combinations of different species that have long disappeared. “Non human hominids” are frequently groups that mixed with Homo sapiens. Large variances in human populations come from different hybrid compositions
"(...)an unusual segment of DNA that extends for >31 kb on chromosome 4 seems to have introgressed into modern Africans from a now-extinct taxon that may have lived in central Africa"
That's fascinating stuff. Says introgression may have occured 35ky ago from a branch that split 700ky ago.
The statement "Large variances in human populations come from different hybrid compositions" seems a particularly provocative statement. Is there a source where this comes from?
I don't see how. Many of us have Neanderthal DNA. Objective facts are only considered (falsely) provocative if the provoked has an axe to grind, or a pursuit other than objective truth.
I definitely see how this statement is provocative when overwhelming scientific consensus underlines a very low variance in human population that is NOT explained by variance in traces of non-homo sapiens DNA.
In light of recent news, this is an extremely misleading choice of title, given that the orginal was "241,000 to 335,000 Years Old Rock Engravings Made by Homo naledi in the Rising Star Cave system, South Africa".
It's not news that non- homo sapien sapiens had things like art, music, an mortuary practices.
