human origins
How did the modern human mind evolve?
What happened to our cousin species?
What were the lives and stories of our ancestors?
What happened over the last 500 generations?
Who were the people at Blombos Cave?
Or at Bhimbetka, or Lascaux, or Denisova?
How do we have confidence in the answers to any of these questions?
Cousin Species
Neanderthals were living in Europe for something like half a million years until about 40,000 years ago Denisova people, dwarf hominins of Flores, and possibly more
Early Human Evolution
Modern humans from hail from African coasts, the cradle of the human brain Much of our knowledge of humans in prehistory comes from archaeology and in more recent times from genetic analysis
Ideas about how humans evolved
💡 About 75,000 we were still colouring, making beads, learning
chemsitry, maybe even using symbolic language.
Afterwards, better wiring up of the brain came about possibly
through seafood nutrients from diet
💡 There was also a period where an Evolutionary bottleneck
that can be seen within human genome suggesting a population crash
- possibly taking the population to 600 breeding adults
(Multiple) Migrations out of Africa 🌍
Humans then travelled to the edges of the world. The extant diving bajao people of the South Philippines are maybe descendants of a specific such migration ...
Research Material Resources
- Big History Project
- Homo Sapiens: Child of the Ice Age
- World Populations Estimates
- Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich
- Early Indians by Tony Joseph
-
Which of us are Aryans?
by Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel,
Jaya Menon, Kai Friese, and Razib Khan - The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski (Documentary)
Research Scientists Working on Human Origins
Chris Stringer, Niobe Thompson, Jayne Wilkins, Christopher Henshilwood, John Parkington, Erika Schagatay, Marta Lahr, Eske Willerslev, Tom Coulthard, Peter Parham, Brian Fagan, Piers Vitebsky