Civilization, as we think of it today, is a mere 6,000 years or so old. Few of us know where our ancestors were living 6,000 years ago, although most of us could make educated guesses. Modern Americans generally think of 6,000 years ago (4,000 BC) as a very long time ago, but anthropologists, geologists and certainly astrophysicists would take a different few. Civilization may have appeared very recently, but our human species (called hominids) appeared much, much earlier. Good scientific evidence shows that people have been around for at least 100,000 years, possibly 4 million years, depending on what animal you mean when you say "people."
Our species is called homo sapiens. It means "double wise human." there have been two general types of homo sapiens : archaic and modern. The modern form began around 35,000 years ago, but there is something of a controversy about when the archaic form first appeared. Suffice it to say that none of us, should we find the body of an archaic homo sapiens, could tell the difference between it and a modern one. It would take a good forensic anthropologist to do so.
Although we are now the only living member of the genus "homo," in times past we have had several close relatives. They had names like homo heidelburgensis, homo sapiens neandertalensis, homo erectus and homo habilis. They were much like us. They were highly intelligent, walked upright on two legs, made and used tools. They even built simple villages (in the case of neanderthal and heidelburgensis). The most ancient of these cousins of ours, homo habilis, was quite a bit shorter than we are today, but if you found a homo habiline skeleton in your backyard, you’d probably assume it was just a small modern human. Only a good coroner or a forensic anthropologist could tell the difference. The thickness of the skull, the thickness of the tooth enamel, the size of the teeth and the size of the brain would provide distinguishing clues. But the overall appearance of all these creatures is very human, and they are contained within the same genus (homo) as we.
Homo habilis first appeared around 2.4 million years ago. Dinosaurs had been extinct for over 60 million years at the time, and there had been a series of human-like ancestors before homo habilis. But homo habilis was unique among all the then-living primates. Only homo habilis made and used tools. While chimps are known to strip twigs off of branches to make "fishing" rods for ants, and to pound food with rocks or to throw rocks at selected targets (including each other), homo habilis was rather more sophisticated. Homo habilis selected rocks with care and chipped their edges to make scrapers, founders, diggers and other tools for foraging. Homo habilis did not hunt and did not possess even a simple ax or knife. Homo habilis lived only in africa, in the great rift valley south of Egypt. Homo habilis shared his world with rhinos, hippos, giraffes and other African animals.
Around 1.7 million years ago, one of homo habilis’s descendants grew taller and smarter. The first ice age was just ending, and apparently the difficult weather conditions of that period left only the bigger and smarter hominids alive. While homo erectus’s brain was not quite as big as ours, it was almost as large and contained the early buds of the two specialized brain centers responsible for speech: broca’s brain and wernecke’s brain. Anatomists believe that homo erectus’s voice box was much more primitive than ours, so it could only utter a few sounds. But chimps and gorillas have a fairly complex language of sounds, signals and gestures, by which they can communicate up to 200 separate concepts. Certainly, homo erectus managed language better than a chimp or a gorilla. Homo erectus’s brain was fully four times as big as a chimp’s. Homo erectus stood six feet tall and lived an athletic, active lifestyle in the savannas of Africa. He scavenged and hunted big game, learning to scare herd animals like antelope and buffalo off of cliffs or into bogs, where he could club and kill them. Homo erectus’s big contribution to the human toolkit was the handax. This crude tool had no shaft, and, as its name implies, was handheld. But it was sharp and deadly. As the millennia rolled on, homo erectus learned that certain rocks (flint, quartz, obsidian) made far better tools than others, and learned to flake both edges of oval-shaped rocks into points that look a great deal like arrowheads. The technology needed to mount a spear- or arrowhead on a shaft was thousands of years away, but homo erectus flourished with his new toolkit, which contained primitive knives, punches, awls and grinders as well as the tools that homo habilis had invented. Homo erectus became the first human-like creature to leave Africa.
Homo erectus needed a great deal of territory in which to live, mainly because of his wasteful hunting habits. Homo erectus couldn’t stomach the muscle part of his meat-kills, because he didn’t have fire, at first. Instead, homo erectus gleaned the softer organ meats from his kills and ate those. He also used other parts of the animal’s body for tools and clothing, but in general, homo erectus must have wasted a lot of what he killed. Also, the "drive-them-off-the cliff" method of killing almost always killed way more animals than homo erectus could use. Homo erectus had to move on, looking for more herd to track. Homo erectus found Africa too crowded about 1.2 million years ago, and headed out for greener pastures, following the herds of big game animals across the northeast section of Africa, over the red sea, through what is now called the middle east and over into India. Eventually, homo erectus found hunting grounds throughout Asia, first populating the seacoasts and some of the main islands, like java, and moving northward up into what is now china.
It is thought that little bands of homo erectus headed out of Africa in successive waves. These groups may have been as small as 20 individuals or as large as 100, but they were almost certainly kinsfolk. A man and his brothers, or a woman and her sisters, may have formed the nucleus of these little groups, with offspring who were first and second cousins marrying in the next generation. This type of "in-breeding" caused each little group to have distinctive (ethnic) appearances. Some of these early migrants from Africa were dark-skinned, some had medium brown skin, some had straight hair, some had curly hair. Some ended up founding populations in Melanesia, others are the ancestral Asian stock. Scientists disagree over whether later waves of migrants out of Africa mingled and intermarried with the earlier ones, but at any rate, before 1.3 million years ago, everyone now living had an ancestor living in Africa. If mitochondrial DNA analysis (a sophisticated scientific analysis of cellular DNA that is passed on from mother to child outside the nucleus of the cell) is correct, all of us also possess DNA from one woman who lived in Africa a mere 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Her descendants were so successful that, as they spread out from Africa, they intermarried with members of every other human population. At 150,000 years ago, this was not so difficult, since the world was still sparsely populated and no one lived in the western hemisphere at that time.
By 350,000 years ago, homo erectus was living in most parts of Africa, southeast Asia, Indonesia, and many parts of Europe. One of homo erectus’ big advantages is that it did not compete directly with any existing animals in the ecosystems it encountered, with the exception of other big game predators, like bears and big cats. Homo erectus avoided the very cold parts of northern Europe and Asia when he could, but sometimes herds of caribou and reindeer tempted him to venture into very cold, northern areas, where he was forced to live off an exclusively meat-based diet. His health suffered, infant mortality was high. It was a difficult life. It was made especially difficult by the fact that homo erectus did not know how to make fire. At various times, in various places, homo erectus learned to use fire, by collecting it opportunistically from forest and brush fires caused by lightening. Cooked food was a marvelous revelation to homo erectus, not because of the taste (he was used to raw food of course) but because humans do not digest raw muscle meat particularly well. Homo erectus had mainly been eating soft organ meats, particularly brains and livers. Now, with the use of fire, homo erectus could eat tough muscle meat. With this new technology, homo erectus wasted very little and could raise more children off of the same hunting efforts. This led to an increase in population. However, if the fire ever went out, homo erectus was stranded. Fire had to be borrowed from neighbors or the band had to wait until the next fire season. By 300,000 years ago, most groups of homo erectus were using stone lamps to guard their fires and the position of "fire-guardian" must have been very important. If homo erectus had not been able to use fire in this fashion, the cold snap that occurred just after 300kya would certainly have forced him out of many of his favorite habitats.
There is little or no evidence that homo erectus pursued many leisure time activities. There is no homo erectine art, musical instruments, decorative clothing, jewelry, or even decorated tools. Everything homo erectus made was utilitarian in nature, devoid of extra flourishes. They lived in the open much of the time, although in some places they may have built simple shelters. It is likely they worked animal hides to make shoes and other articles of apparel, as well as packs and carrying bags for their relatively heavy tools.
Around 175,000 years ago, at the tip of south Africa, the first known homo sapiens appear. They are called "archaic" homo sapiens because, although their brains are as large and complex as ours, their teeth and heads were still slightly thicker and bigger. Ice ages had begun alternately freezing and thawing the world around 2 million years ago, and a major ice age was just ending when homo sapiens appeared. Every ice age was grim for homo erectus, but the survivors gained skills - and biological features - their ancestors didn’t have. In south Africa, homo erectus had evolved into homo sapiens. There is no evidence that this is the first or the only place where this occurred, but it is the earliest site found by modern archaeologists.
During an ice age, the world’s oceans shrink as water becomes trapped as ice in the huge polar ice caps and fields of glaciers covering the far north and far south of each continent. When this happens, more land appears. The contemporary coastline, therefore, can be considered inland from where it was 200,000 years ago. Homo sapiens appears to have flourished along the coasts, surviving on shellfish and fishing, living in caves. Many of their earliest sites are likely under water, 20 to 50 miles of the coasts of Africa and possibly Asia. We may never know where.
At any rate, homo sapiens advanced rapidly. Within 25,000 years, homo sapiens had invented things homo erectus had only dreamed of. The homo sapiens brain was about 20% bigger than that of homo erectus, and it contained fully developed language centers. The voice box and other speech equipment (as far as we can tell from skeletal remains) of early homo sapiens was much like ours. Language has been evolving for a long time, and continues to evolve, so it is unlikely that archaic homo sapiens had quite as complex a language as ours, but her thought patterns and conceptual apparatus were remarkably similar - or identical - to ours.
Homo sapiens was expert in the use of fire, possessing a variety of stone lamps fueled by oil. Homo sapiens learned to make fire around 150,000 years ago, although the technology did not become universal right away. Homo sapiens also learned to make a variety of barbs, harpoons, fishhooks, and, at least, spears. The bow and arrow were still a long way in the future, as were simple levers and machines (like the spear thrower). Homo sapiens favored seasonal migratory patterns, with a kind of summer camp and winter camp, each camp near a major type of local food supply. Pottery, baskets, cloth, and many other inventions were still in the future.
Many anthropologists believe that this early population of homo sapiens was so superior to homo erectus that it out-competed homo erectus and completely displaced them from Africa by about 125,000 years ago. Early homo sapiens had no tools of war, and there is no sign that homo sapiens ever fought with or killed any homo erectus. Homo erectus slowly died out, its resources usurped by the smarter and more efficient homo sapiens. In at least one part of the world, on an island in the pacific, homo erectus survived until about 50,000 years ago, living side by side with homo sapiens. In the area best explored by archaeologists, these surviving homo erectines lived across a river from the homo sapiens population, each quietly keeping to themselves. The homo erectines’ population dwindled generation by generation and then became extinct.
By 100,000 years ago, homo sapiens was beginning to show up in Asia and Europe. Some people believe that homo sapiens evolved separately in those places, from existing homo erecting stock. Others believe (and the mitochondrial DNA analysis seems to support them) that a particularly hardy and successful stock of homo sapiens, living in northeastern Africa, was responsible for a great Diaspora. There is certainly evidence that successive waves of homo sapiens arrived in Europe and Asia from Africa starting at around 100,000 years ago. Recent studies suggest that homo sapiens arrived in Australia as early as 125,000 years ago, when another ice age made decreased the amount of open water that they must have had to traverse. It is unknown whether these early people had boats or rafts, since wooden objects do not survive over long periods of time, but it would certainly seem that some sort of flotation device was used - even if only logs swept offshore during a storm, bearing human cargo who were lucky enough not to drown before reaching dry, uninhabited shores.
Linguists believe that this early African population of homo sapiens spread their language throughout the world, even if they did not physically spread themselves or their genes. Cultural tools, like language, can spread and disperse themselves over great distances, even when their original inventors stay far behind. Certainly, there are enough physical differences among the world’s peoples at 100,000 years ago to indicate that they didn’t all have the exact same ancestry, even if some genes may have been dispersed and shared.
Headed, from about 900,000 years ago until the present. In Europe, people were taller and more robust, from around 350,000 years ago. Africa contained the greatest diversity of people, then and now, with heights ranging from averages of under 5 feet (amongst so-called Pygmy populations) to over 6 ½ feet, among tribes like those ancestral to modern people like the Watusi. Asians in general were shorter than Europeans or Africans, with more Gracie features, and rounder, flatter faces. European faces were more probated, with jutting jaws or receding chins, pointed noses, and sloping foreheads. Africa contained evidence of all these features.
Anthropologists believe that these early homo sapiens ranged in skin tone from what we today call "black" to a medium tan color, with sub variations involving skin tones of yellow, red and blue. The darkest people in the world probably lived in what is now India and Ceylon and had straight hair and otherwise "Caucasian" features. The great majority of people had black hair and brown eyes, as today. There were some interesting subpopulations. In Melanesia, there were African-looking folks with orange hair and green eyes; in southern Polynesia, there were somewhat African-looking folks with frizzy brown hair and blue or brown eyes. In Europe, a distinct population of blond-haired, blue-eyed people evolved. Indeed, in the far north of Europe, in places like Norway and Denmark, the entire population evolved to have only blond hair and blue eyes.
The racial enigma - how and where the so-called "races" evolved - has its roots in two more ice ages, one lasting from about 125-75,000 years ago and the last one at 35,000 to 12,000 years ago. In northern Europe, the ice ages were extremely harsh, due both to longitude and altitude. Homo sapiens living there had been accomplished fire-makers since about 125,000 years ago but the ice ages had many hazards. Europe was covered with dense fog, and what is now temperate forest land was then arctic tundra, with little or no vegetation besides lichen. Caribou and reindeer were the only foods for people to eat. Thousands of people died during this ice age in Europe alone, while in Africa, conditions grew drier and cooler, but remained generally much less harsh. The annual available sunlight in Europe was almost zero. There was no growing season.
In these harsh conditions, aside from the nutritional problems associated with lack of vegetables, humans have also to contend with lack of sunlight. Until the invention of modern vitamin technology, which places lots of the essential vitamin d in every glass of milk and many other products, the only source of vitamin d was sunlight. Too much sunlight causes cataracts and cancer, but too little sunlight causes warping of the bones, headaches, devastation to the immune system, infections, slow healing and even death. The skin is the organ that regulates the uptake of vitamin d through the production of a substance called melanin.
Melanin is the pigment responsible for skin, eye and hair color in mammals. The more melanin you have in your skin, the less vitamin d your skin can process - and the more protected you are against cataracts, cancer and immune deficiencies from too much sun. The less melanin you have, the more vitamin d your skin can process. Melanin is responsible for skin color as well. More melanin means darker skin and vice versa. The only people able to survive for generations (some 25,000 years or more) in ice age Europe had very little melanin in their skin. They are blond- and blue-eyed.
Much has been made of this distinction, and we will discuss the effects of skin color on history in later chapters. For now, it is enough to realize that the difference in the amount of melanin in the skin of the lightest Norwegian and the darkest Tamil Indian is a mere 1/16th of an ounce! Melanin plays no other role in the human body, it is found only in the skin, hair and eyes. It does not effect behavior, thought, language, intelligence, emotions or anything else we know of in the human body. It is there to aid in the processing of vitamin d, just as various digestive enzymes are there to digest different components of our diet. When a group of people lives near the equator for a long period of time, their skin gradually grows darker, as malignant melanoma claims the lives of the lightest skinned people and cuts short their reproductive span. The inverse is true in northern climates. As we move north, out of Africa, skin color grows lighter with each passing band of latitude. This is generally true throughout the world, although recent migrations obviously do not have time to evolve and thus appear as exceptions to the rule.
Ice ages in Europe accomplished a few other things, as well. Necessity is truly the mother of invention, and ice age Europeans grew accomplished at big game hunting and the weaponry associated with it. They had little chance to experiment with agriculture or plants, but they would invent the spear thrower and a variety of sophisticated spearheads. Meanwhile, in warmer climates, simple gardening would develop. As the last ice age began, the retreating ocean opened up a land bridge from Asia, across the Bering strait, to Canada and Alaska, and thousands of European and Asian tribal folks passed across that bridge to become the first native Americans, showing up in what is now new Mexico by 28,000 years ago. At the height of the ice age, even the most intrepid explorers could not make it from Asia to north America. It is unknown whether some of the new north Americans returned to Asia with news of the vast, new, uninhabited continent. Probably not. But when the last ice age ended, 12,000 years ago, many more waves of mostly Asian tribal folks spread into north America, continuously migrating until they reached the very tip of Patagonia by 10,000 years ago.
The similarities in dress, customs, religion and language between Asians living 12,000 years ago and native Americans are striking, and we will cover those later in this reading. For now, it is enough to contemplate this great human Diaspora. At 10,000 years ago, tribal people - all of them hunter-gatherers, with no metal tools of any kind, had populated the major continents except Antarctica. The large islands of the pacific were inhabited, and only the tiny, remote islands of Polynesia and Micronesia remained for exploration and settlement. At 10,000 years ago, boats were in use, but what made people leave their homelands and head into uncharted waters in the pacific remains a mystery. Thor Heyerdahl maintains that trade caused people to navigate huge stretches of the pacific, and he believes most of their voyages involved successful returns to their homelands.
Overpopulation, warfare, and religious conflict begin to appear in the prehistoric record at about 10,000 years ago, and all are known reasons for some of the pacific migrations. By 10,000 years ago, basketry and pottery were established arts in nearly all the world, and in Ireland and Japan, the bow and arrow had been invented. The ancestors of contemporary Micronesians and Polynesians were probably still living in Asia, possibly in Thailand, Ceylon and India. They left their homelands as refugees of sorts, looking for places that would take them in. Some were lucky, finding uninhabited islands; many drowned; some were enslaved on already inhabited islands; some simply settled down amongst already existing populations and intermarried. The Diaspora continued.
In the far north, no one had ever managed to live year round in the arctic tundra until the Eskimos invented a lifestyle for themselves there, at around 3,500 years ago, populating Siberia, northern Canada and the edges of Alaska and maintaining their populations there until the present time. Their lifestyle and diet was very much like the ice age lifestyle of Europe. As time wore on, Eskimos grew shorter and stockier, with more fat cells around their central bodies, in response to the extreme cold.
As Polynesians trekked through the pacific, using a sophisticated celestial navigation system and large, sturdy boats, they settled the western part of Polynesia first. They were intentional settlers. When they left, they provisioned their longboats with all the things they knew were essential for life on a new island: chickens, pigs, dogs, taro root, bananas, coconuts and other foodstuffs. In the beginning, they also took pottery, but by the time they settled Hawaii, Polynesians had lost the craft of making pottery; they had stopped taking it with them. Hawaii, the world’s most isolated island chain, was one of the last places on earth to be settled at about 1600 years ago. Surprisingly, people had managed to "miss" New Zealand and, when Hawaiian voyagers found it around 800 years ago, the world was finally "full.".
Our species is called homo sapiens. It means "double wise human." there have been two general types of homo sapiens : archaic and modern. The modern form began around 35,000 years ago, but there is something of a controversy about when the archaic form first appeared. Suffice it to say that none of us, should we find the body of an archaic homo sapiens, could tell the difference between it and a modern one. It would take a good forensic anthropologist to do so.
Although we are now the only living member of the genus "homo," in times past we have had several close relatives. They had names like homo heidelburgensis, homo sapiens neandertalensis, homo erectus and homo habilis. They were much like us. They were highly intelligent, walked upright on two legs, made and used tools. They even built simple villages (in the case of neanderthal and heidelburgensis). The most ancient of these cousins of ours, homo habilis, was quite a bit shorter than we are today, but if you found a homo habiline skeleton in your backyard, you’d probably assume it was just a small modern human. Only a good coroner or a forensic anthropologist could tell the difference. The thickness of the skull, the thickness of the tooth enamel, the size of the teeth and the size of the brain would provide distinguishing clues. But the overall appearance of all these creatures is very human, and they are contained within the same genus (homo) as we.
Homo habilis first appeared around 2.4 million years ago. Dinosaurs had been extinct for over 60 million years at the time, and there had been a series of human-like ancestors before homo habilis. But homo habilis was unique among all the then-living primates. Only homo habilis made and used tools. While chimps are known to strip twigs off of branches to make "fishing" rods for ants, and to pound food with rocks or to throw rocks at selected targets (including each other), homo habilis was rather more sophisticated. Homo habilis selected rocks with care and chipped their edges to make scrapers, founders, diggers and other tools for foraging. Homo habilis did not hunt and did not possess even a simple ax or knife. Homo habilis lived only in africa, in the great rift valley south of Egypt. Homo habilis shared his world with rhinos, hippos, giraffes and other African animals.
Around 1.7 million years ago, one of homo habilis’s descendants grew taller and smarter. The first ice age was just ending, and apparently the difficult weather conditions of that period left only the bigger and smarter hominids alive. While homo erectus’s brain was not quite as big as ours, it was almost as large and contained the early buds of the two specialized brain centers responsible for speech: broca’s brain and wernecke’s brain. Anatomists believe that homo erectus’s voice box was much more primitive than ours, so it could only utter a few sounds. But chimps and gorillas have a fairly complex language of sounds, signals and gestures, by which they can communicate up to 200 separate concepts. Certainly, homo erectus managed language better than a chimp or a gorilla. Homo erectus’s brain was fully four times as big as a chimp’s. Homo erectus stood six feet tall and lived an athletic, active lifestyle in the savannas of Africa. He scavenged and hunted big game, learning to scare herd animals like antelope and buffalo off of cliffs or into bogs, where he could club and kill them. Homo erectus’s big contribution to the human toolkit was the handax. This crude tool had no shaft, and, as its name implies, was handheld. But it was sharp and deadly. As the millennia rolled on, homo erectus learned that certain rocks (flint, quartz, obsidian) made far better tools than others, and learned to flake both edges of oval-shaped rocks into points that look a great deal like arrowheads. The technology needed to mount a spear- or arrowhead on a shaft was thousands of years away, but homo erectus flourished with his new toolkit, which contained primitive knives, punches, awls and grinders as well as the tools that homo habilis had invented. Homo erectus became the first human-like creature to leave Africa.
Homo erectus needed a great deal of territory in which to live, mainly because of his wasteful hunting habits. Homo erectus couldn’t stomach the muscle part of his meat-kills, because he didn’t have fire, at first. Instead, homo erectus gleaned the softer organ meats from his kills and ate those. He also used other parts of the animal’s body for tools and clothing, but in general, homo erectus must have wasted a lot of what he killed. Also, the "drive-them-off-the cliff" method of killing almost always killed way more animals than homo erectus could use. Homo erectus had to move on, looking for more herd to track. Homo erectus found Africa too crowded about 1.2 million years ago, and headed out for greener pastures, following the herds of big game animals across the northeast section of Africa, over the red sea, through what is now called the middle east and over into India. Eventually, homo erectus found hunting grounds throughout Asia, first populating the seacoasts and some of the main islands, like java, and moving northward up into what is now china.
It is thought that little bands of homo erectus headed out of Africa in successive waves. These groups may have been as small as 20 individuals or as large as 100, but they were almost certainly kinsfolk. A man and his brothers, or a woman and her sisters, may have formed the nucleus of these little groups, with offspring who were first and second cousins marrying in the next generation. This type of "in-breeding" caused each little group to have distinctive (ethnic) appearances. Some of these early migrants from Africa were dark-skinned, some had medium brown skin, some had straight hair, some had curly hair. Some ended up founding populations in Melanesia, others are the ancestral Asian stock. Scientists disagree over whether later waves of migrants out of Africa mingled and intermarried with the earlier ones, but at any rate, before 1.3 million years ago, everyone now living had an ancestor living in Africa. If mitochondrial DNA analysis (a sophisticated scientific analysis of cellular DNA that is passed on from mother to child outside the nucleus of the cell) is correct, all of us also possess DNA from one woman who lived in Africa a mere 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Her descendants were so successful that, as they spread out from Africa, they intermarried with members of every other human population. At 150,000 years ago, this was not so difficult, since the world was still sparsely populated and no one lived in the western hemisphere at that time.
By 350,000 years ago, homo erectus was living in most parts of Africa, southeast Asia, Indonesia, and many parts of Europe. One of homo erectus’ big advantages is that it did not compete directly with any existing animals in the ecosystems it encountered, with the exception of other big game predators, like bears and big cats. Homo erectus avoided the very cold parts of northern Europe and Asia when he could, but sometimes herds of caribou and reindeer tempted him to venture into very cold, northern areas, where he was forced to live off an exclusively meat-based diet. His health suffered, infant mortality was high. It was a difficult life. It was made especially difficult by the fact that homo erectus did not know how to make fire. At various times, in various places, homo erectus learned to use fire, by collecting it opportunistically from forest and brush fires caused by lightening. Cooked food was a marvelous revelation to homo erectus, not because of the taste (he was used to raw food of course) but because humans do not digest raw muscle meat particularly well. Homo erectus had mainly been eating soft organ meats, particularly brains and livers. Now, with the use of fire, homo erectus could eat tough muscle meat. With this new technology, homo erectus wasted very little and could raise more children off of the same hunting efforts. This led to an increase in population. However, if the fire ever went out, homo erectus was stranded. Fire had to be borrowed from neighbors or the band had to wait until the next fire season. By 300,000 years ago, most groups of homo erectus were using stone lamps to guard their fires and the position of "fire-guardian" must have been very important. If homo erectus had not been able to use fire in this fashion, the cold snap that occurred just after 300kya would certainly have forced him out of many of his favorite habitats.
There is little or no evidence that homo erectus pursued many leisure time activities. There is no homo erectine art, musical instruments, decorative clothing, jewelry, or even decorated tools. Everything homo erectus made was utilitarian in nature, devoid of extra flourishes. They lived in the open much of the time, although in some places they may have built simple shelters. It is likely they worked animal hides to make shoes and other articles of apparel, as well as packs and carrying bags for their relatively heavy tools.
Around 175,000 years ago, at the tip of south Africa, the first known homo sapiens appear. They are called "archaic" homo sapiens because, although their brains are as large and complex as ours, their teeth and heads were still slightly thicker and bigger. Ice ages had begun alternately freezing and thawing the world around 2 million years ago, and a major ice age was just ending when homo sapiens appeared. Every ice age was grim for homo erectus, but the survivors gained skills - and biological features - their ancestors didn’t have. In south Africa, homo erectus had evolved into homo sapiens. There is no evidence that this is the first or the only place where this occurred, but it is the earliest site found by modern archaeologists.
During an ice age, the world’s oceans shrink as water becomes trapped as ice in the huge polar ice caps and fields of glaciers covering the far north and far south of each continent. When this happens, more land appears. The contemporary coastline, therefore, can be considered inland from where it was 200,000 years ago. Homo sapiens appears to have flourished along the coasts, surviving on shellfish and fishing, living in caves. Many of their earliest sites are likely under water, 20 to 50 miles of the coasts of Africa and possibly Asia. We may never know where.
At any rate, homo sapiens advanced rapidly. Within 25,000 years, homo sapiens had invented things homo erectus had only dreamed of. The homo sapiens brain was about 20% bigger than that of homo erectus, and it contained fully developed language centers. The voice box and other speech equipment (as far as we can tell from skeletal remains) of early homo sapiens was much like ours. Language has been evolving for a long time, and continues to evolve, so it is unlikely that archaic homo sapiens had quite as complex a language as ours, but her thought patterns and conceptual apparatus were remarkably similar - or identical - to ours.
Homo sapiens was expert in the use of fire, possessing a variety of stone lamps fueled by oil. Homo sapiens learned to make fire around 150,000 years ago, although the technology did not become universal right away. Homo sapiens also learned to make a variety of barbs, harpoons, fishhooks, and, at least, spears. The bow and arrow were still a long way in the future, as were simple levers and machines (like the spear thrower). Homo sapiens favored seasonal migratory patterns, with a kind of summer camp and winter camp, each camp near a major type of local food supply. Pottery, baskets, cloth, and many other inventions were still in the future.
Many anthropologists believe that this early population of homo sapiens was so superior to homo erectus that it out-competed homo erectus and completely displaced them from Africa by about 125,000 years ago. Early homo sapiens had no tools of war, and there is no sign that homo sapiens ever fought with or killed any homo erectus. Homo erectus slowly died out, its resources usurped by the smarter and more efficient homo sapiens. In at least one part of the world, on an island in the pacific, homo erectus survived until about 50,000 years ago, living side by side with homo sapiens. In the area best explored by archaeologists, these surviving homo erectines lived across a river from the homo sapiens population, each quietly keeping to themselves. The homo erectines’ population dwindled generation by generation and then became extinct.
By 100,000 years ago, homo sapiens was beginning to show up in Asia and Europe. Some people believe that homo sapiens evolved separately in those places, from existing homo erecting stock. Others believe (and the mitochondrial DNA analysis seems to support them) that a particularly hardy and successful stock of homo sapiens, living in northeastern Africa, was responsible for a great Diaspora. There is certainly evidence that successive waves of homo sapiens arrived in Europe and Asia from Africa starting at around 100,000 years ago. Recent studies suggest that homo sapiens arrived in Australia as early as 125,000 years ago, when another ice age made decreased the amount of open water that they must have had to traverse. It is unknown whether these early people had boats or rafts, since wooden objects do not survive over long periods of time, but it would certainly seem that some sort of flotation device was used - even if only logs swept offshore during a storm, bearing human cargo who were lucky enough not to drown before reaching dry, uninhabited shores.
Linguists believe that this early African population of homo sapiens spread their language throughout the world, even if they did not physically spread themselves or their genes. Cultural tools, like language, can spread and disperse themselves over great distances, even when their original inventors stay far behind. Certainly, there are enough physical differences among the world’s peoples at 100,000 years ago to indicate that they didn’t all have the exact same ancestry, even if some genes may have been dispersed and shared.
Headed, from about 900,000 years ago until the present. In Europe, people were taller and more robust, from around 350,000 years ago. Africa contained the greatest diversity of people, then and now, with heights ranging from averages of under 5 feet (amongst so-called Pygmy populations) to over 6 ½ feet, among tribes like those ancestral to modern people like the Watusi. Asians in general were shorter than Europeans or Africans, with more Gracie features, and rounder, flatter faces. European faces were more probated, with jutting jaws or receding chins, pointed noses, and sloping foreheads. Africa contained evidence of all these features.
Anthropologists believe that these early homo sapiens ranged in skin tone from what we today call "black" to a medium tan color, with sub variations involving skin tones of yellow, red and blue. The darkest people in the world probably lived in what is now India and Ceylon and had straight hair and otherwise "Caucasian" features. The great majority of people had black hair and brown eyes, as today. There were some interesting subpopulations. In Melanesia, there were African-looking folks with orange hair and green eyes; in southern Polynesia, there were somewhat African-looking folks with frizzy brown hair and blue or brown eyes. In Europe, a distinct population of blond-haired, blue-eyed people evolved. Indeed, in the far north of Europe, in places like Norway and Denmark, the entire population evolved to have only blond hair and blue eyes.
The racial enigma - how and where the so-called "races" evolved - has its roots in two more ice ages, one lasting from about 125-75,000 years ago and the last one at 35,000 to 12,000 years ago. In northern Europe, the ice ages were extremely harsh, due both to longitude and altitude. Homo sapiens living there had been accomplished fire-makers since about 125,000 years ago but the ice ages had many hazards. Europe was covered with dense fog, and what is now temperate forest land was then arctic tundra, with little or no vegetation besides lichen. Caribou and reindeer were the only foods for people to eat. Thousands of people died during this ice age in Europe alone, while in Africa, conditions grew drier and cooler, but remained generally much less harsh. The annual available sunlight in Europe was almost zero. There was no growing season.
In these harsh conditions, aside from the nutritional problems associated with lack of vegetables, humans have also to contend with lack of sunlight. Until the invention of modern vitamin technology, which places lots of the essential vitamin d in every glass of milk and many other products, the only source of vitamin d was sunlight. Too much sunlight causes cataracts and cancer, but too little sunlight causes warping of the bones, headaches, devastation to the immune system, infections, slow healing and even death. The skin is the organ that regulates the uptake of vitamin d through the production of a substance called melanin.
Melanin is the pigment responsible for skin, eye and hair color in mammals. The more melanin you have in your skin, the less vitamin d your skin can process - and the more protected you are against cataracts, cancer and immune deficiencies from too much sun. The less melanin you have, the more vitamin d your skin can process. Melanin is responsible for skin color as well. More melanin means darker skin and vice versa. The only people able to survive for generations (some 25,000 years or more) in ice age Europe had very little melanin in their skin. They are blond- and blue-eyed.
Much has been made of this distinction, and we will discuss the effects of skin color on history in later chapters. For now, it is enough to realize that the difference in the amount of melanin in the skin of the lightest Norwegian and the darkest Tamil Indian is a mere 1/16th of an ounce! Melanin plays no other role in the human body, it is found only in the skin, hair and eyes. It does not effect behavior, thought, language, intelligence, emotions or anything else we know of in the human body. It is there to aid in the processing of vitamin d, just as various digestive enzymes are there to digest different components of our diet. When a group of people lives near the equator for a long period of time, their skin gradually grows darker, as malignant melanoma claims the lives of the lightest skinned people and cuts short their reproductive span. The inverse is true in northern climates. As we move north, out of Africa, skin color grows lighter with each passing band of latitude. This is generally true throughout the world, although recent migrations obviously do not have time to evolve and thus appear as exceptions to the rule.
Ice ages in Europe accomplished a few other things, as well. Necessity is truly the mother of invention, and ice age Europeans grew accomplished at big game hunting and the weaponry associated with it. They had little chance to experiment with agriculture or plants, but they would invent the spear thrower and a variety of sophisticated spearheads. Meanwhile, in warmer climates, simple gardening would develop. As the last ice age began, the retreating ocean opened up a land bridge from Asia, across the Bering strait, to Canada and Alaska, and thousands of European and Asian tribal folks passed across that bridge to become the first native Americans, showing up in what is now new Mexico by 28,000 years ago. At the height of the ice age, even the most intrepid explorers could not make it from Asia to north America. It is unknown whether some of the new north Americans returned to Asia with news of the vast, new, uninhabited continent. Probably not. But when the last ice age ended, 12,000 years ago, many more waves of mostly Asian tribal folks spread into north America, continuously migrating until they reached the very tip of Patagonia by 10,000 years ago.
The similarities in dress, customs, religion and language between Asians living 12,000 years ago and native Americans are striking, and we will cover those later in this reading. For now, it is enough to contemplate this great human Diaspora. At 10,000 years ago, tribal people - all of them hunter-gatherers, with no metal tools of any kind, had populated the major continents except Antarctica. The large islands of the pacific were inhabited, and only the tiny, remote islands of Polynesia and Micronesia remained for exploration and settlement. At 10,000 years ago, boats were in use, but what made people leave their homelands and head into uncharted waters in the pacific remains a mystery. Thor Heyerdahl maintains that trade caused people to navigate huge stretches of the pacific, and he believes most of their voyages involved successful returns to their homelands.
Overpopulation, warfare, and religious conflict begin to appear in the prehistoric record at about 10,000 years ago, and all are known reasons for some of the pacific migrations. By 10,000 years ago, basketry and pottery were established arts in nearly all the world, and in Ireland and Japan, the bow and arrow had been invented. The ancestors of contemporary Micronesians and Polynesians were probably still living in Asia, possibly in Thailand, Ceylon and India. They left their homelands as refugees of sorts, looking for places that would take them in. Some were lucky, finding uninhabited islands; many drowned; some were enslaved on already inhabited islands; some simply settled down amongst already existing populations and intermarried. The Diaspora continued.
In the far north, no one had ever managed to live year round in the arctic tundra until the Eskimos invented a lifestyle for themselves there, at around 3,500 years ago, populating Siberia, northern Canada and the edges of Alaska and maintaining their populations there until the present time. Their lifestyle and diet was very much like the ice age lifestyle of Europe. As time wore on, Eskimos grew shorter and stockier, with more fat cells around their central bodies, in response to the extreme cold.
As Polynesians trekked through the pacific, using a sophisticated celestial navigation system and large, sturdy boats, they settled the western part of Polynesia first. They were intentional settlers. When they left, they provisioned their longboats with all the things they knew were essential for life on a new island: chickens, pigs, dogs, taro root, bananas, coconuts and other foodstuffs. In the beginning, they also took pottery, but by the time they settled Hawaii, Polynesians had lost the craft of making pottery; they had stopped taking it with them. Hawaii, the world’s most isolated island chain, was one of the last places on earth to be settled at about 1600 years ago. Surprisingly, people had managed to "miss" New Zealand and, when Hawaiian voyagers found it around 800 years ago, the world was finally "full.".
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