Homo sapiens have been incredibly successful; our resourcefulness and
intelligence coupled with frequent interbreeding with other hominids (including Neanderthals and Denisovians) has attained us the place
as top monkey on the block. As time wore on all other species of Homo died out, whether through competition with us or succumbing to climate change, we have become the sole survivors of our genus. Though still a youthful species (200,000 years old compared to H.erectus 1.5 million years ago) we have changed our planet beyond recognition, so much so that scientists have introduced a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene. From humble beginnings we have come a long way. Through the last 3 (and a bit) months I have taken you on a whistle stop tour of human development and dispersal, through origins just finding our feet to our eventual conquest of the entire planet. However all good things must come to an end, and sadly this is true for this blog. On the bright side I've learnt loads from the research of this blog, it really gave me a great excuse to further my knowledge in a subject area I have always had a particular interest in. I hope you feel like you have gained some insight into our history too. I'll leave you with an answer to a question I know you are all wondering 'who would in in a fight between a Neanderthal and a human?'
As I think I've said before, I am a big promoter of TED Lectures, there are a fantastic way of learning about current research and theories and are delivered in a was that is easy to understand even if you have no previous knowledge of an issue. With that being said I have included a lecture by Mark Pagel on how language has transofmed humanity. Language is one of the corner stones of what makes us different from the rest of the animal kingdom, its development is argued to be a key as the development of bipedalism (a topic I covered in an earlier post) and the control of fire.
The lecturer in the video above explains that the development of social learning, through copying, imitating and observing, allows us to develop on others' ideas. Other advanced species, including Homo erectus and even perhaps Neanderthals were unable to do this. He calls this cumulative cultural adaptation, it allows ideas to develop and enables people to 'stand on the shoulders of giants'.
However social learning leads to visual theft - your neighbour can copy your best ideas and perhaps do them even better. The way we overcame this is through developing language, allowing us to strike deals with one another and cooperate effectively.
I tend to agree with Mark Pagel's ideas, without language and the cooperation it brings, large complex social groups would be very difficult and living in cities would be impossible.
Apologies for last week's blogging silence, Christmas took me away from my computer, however I am back and here with another installment.
Regardless of whether the original Australians came from Africa in an early wave 75,000 years ago or a later split from an Asian population, they still had to undertake an epic journey across Indonesia and a sea voyage to reach this new home. Looking at a map of Australasia today it is difficult to imagine a group travelling such vast distances using only fairly primitive rafts for transport. However as always seems to be the case with human migration, climate seems to have played a role in enabling this spread south into Australia. The world 55-65,000 ya was experiencing a glacial period, because of this large quantities of water were locked away in the polar regions, the consequence of this was that sea levels in the Australasian area were as much as 200m lower. This meant that instead of chains of islands between Australia and Asia there were land bridges - the Sunda and Sahul shelves, allowing the migrating humans to cross an extensive area by land.
Despite much of their journey being across land there was still Wallacea to contend with. As you can see in Figure 1, Wallacea is an area consisting of small islands separated by deep channels of water, the most extensive section of open water would have been 50 miles, across the Java trench. The most likely method of travel across this expanse was using bamboo rafts, whether this journey was possible at such an early time was a debated topic, however the prominent anthropologist Alan Thorne recreated the journey, constructing a raft from materials which would have been available to the ancient population, and using no modern navigational gadgets, the raft lasted the 50 miles of the journey, illustrating that this transportation was a possible mode for the new colonisers .
The video below is taken from 'The Incredible Human Journey', it shows what travel by bamboo raft would have been like and the difficulties that can be encountered in open water. It also suggests that the discovery of Australia would have occurred by accident, mainly because it was over the horizon and would have therefore been into the unknown.
