Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago(biorxiv.org) |
Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago(biorxiv.org) |
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)
This list is so incomplete it's not even funny :)
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.
>In addition, a timeline of culture & technology:
A lot can be accomplished in a few million years that can just not be done in a few hundred thousand.
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.
(IE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin... version of your 300K BC biohazard sigil)
Obviously this is pure imagination but I wonder if that was why they felt the need to scratch the rock or create lines to block it from spreading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_naledi
Edit: this was a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36345824 and dang moved it (??)
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?
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".
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape#Changes_in_taxonomy_and_te...
You will often see mention of Hominin (Homo and Pan (chimpanzees), I think) as well, where you would have once heard Hominid.
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.
Maybe they had more boring classes than we do today though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not aware of anyone teaching rodents to learn from maps, but I'd bet they could.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog...
“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
It's not news that non- homo sapien sapiens had things like art, music, an mortuary practices.
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
Sperm whales don't have much of a chance to manipulate their environment, but they have the largest brains on earth [2].
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-m....
[2] https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/extreme-mammals/extreme-bod....
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.
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.
> 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.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/age-of-near-e...
"(...)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"
They couldn’t find seed investors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Star_Cave
"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"
Or take a look at this map: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/human-evolution/sites/human_evolution/...
The burials and drawings were made over a long period of time,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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_ancient_Roman_...
> 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.
(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.
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.
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.
Citation for that? There's clear evolutionary selection for language capabilities a long time before that isn't here?
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
Source: human evolution PhD, I have worked in faculty of language evolution, prosociality, genetic basis for self-domestication.
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.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37904-w
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.