Homo Erectus: 1 million B.C. to about 500,000 B.C.
Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens split off from common ancestor: 500,000 B.C.
Homo Sapiens dominate Africa until about 70,000 B.C. when they spread into Europe, Middle East, and Asia.
Neanderthals dominate Europe, Middle East, and Asia, until 70,000 B.C. when Homo Sapiens return out of Africa.
There are a few other variations of humans in the 300KYA to 70KYA period, including:
Denisovans (found in Siberia and other places), the "hobbits" found in Indonesia.
It's possible and likely that around 100KYA, there were several species of humans cohabiting the earth, including modern humans (H. sapiens), Neanderthals, Denisovans, a few remaining H. Erectus, the hobbits, and some mixtures of the above.
Each discovery sheds new light and sometimes, as with this possible modern human skull, shatters old theories about the timeline.
It's fascinating to think that at one time in the not-too-distant past, there were multiple species of humans in existence, of which only one survived, though most non-African humans today carry 2-4% Neanderthal genes, so in a sense, some traits of the Neanderthals survived. We are the Neanderthals.
It's time we stopped using the term "Neanderthal" as an insult. They were possibly as smart as modern humans, had larger brains, had tools, ritual burial, weapons technologies, and art work. Their anatomical structure indicates that likely they had language. It's possible that they were gentler than H. Sapiens which would explain how they got gobbled up and made extinct, despite their vast strength (Neanderthals bone structure and muscle attachments indicate that they were many times stronger than modern humans.)
Sort of a tangent, but I've wondered before if the "Nephilim" mentioned in Genesis could have been some distant memory of when Humans coexisted with Neanderthals.
From Wikipedia:
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, "My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
— Genesis 6:1–4, New Revised Standard Version
Basically says that there were people like humans, but different and larger and stronger. And that at some point they died out.
Sounds a lot like what we know about Neanderthals.
Also Genesis is sort of the "deep memory" of humanity. Especially the first few chapters.
The writers of Genesis are our contemporaries, but my understanding is that the first few chapters is a recording of oral traditions that stretch back way further than that.
Would how often, in 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years would the complete chain of human intellectual lineage be broken, and a generation of people be raised with absolutely no input from the preceding generation?
Look through Wikipedia's page on Indo-European vocabulary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary#Kinsh...), and see how recognizable some of the fundamental building blocks of communication are, despite the passage of time, movement of people, and rise and fall of societies.
If word forms can so readily be passed down multiple inheritance trees over thousands of miles and years and still be somewhat recognizable, how improbable is it that we inherited living stories that co-evolved with us through thousands of generations?
I see the link you provided as evidence to the improbability of GP's premise.
Consider that common daily used words can change to a degree that they at best resemble their origin, and that in just a single or two millenniums. Do you believe any oral tradition can survive and preserve anything from it's original meaning after 20k years?
Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who knows (leaving aside kings and the like, where the stories are again only known from canonical origins)? Do you know the name of any of your ancestors from 4,000 years ago? The name of the place they lived in?
Again, 10000 - 13000 years ago is much closer to us than the Neanderthals are to the ancient Aboriginal Australians or the ancient Hebrewes. And this stories, if they indeed are 13,000 years old, are by far the oldest example we have.
Indigenous Australian oral history and cave paintings reference the "dreamtime"[0], which is plausibly the group's initial ocean crossing perhaps ~45k years ago.
More definitely, here[1] is an Australian oral tradition that records a catastrophe ~7k years ago.
The picture is super blurry but then so is Genesis.
So, AFAIR one interpretation of the relative ubiquity of ancient flood myths is that most established cultures had to live through a time of periodic glacial lake outburst floods as the climate warmed from the last glacial maxima, along with rising seas inundating some inland basins like the Persian Gulf.
I'm not sure about the probability or improbability of this premise in the grand scheme of all probable events, but it seems fair to call it a plausible premise. These events would mostly fit on a timeline of 15k years ago to 8k years ago. If this explanation holds water, it means that the origin events of these flood myths pre-date the earliest known forms of writing by at least as much as the writing of early known biblical texts predate the conversation we're having now.
I don't know if I "believe" it, but I definitely wouldn't bet against it. We're not talking about getting teenagers to faithfully memorize and repeat 100 generations of ancestral begats as read by Ben Stein. We're talking about compelling stories that were foundational to the mythos of who a people are and where they came from.
> Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who knows (leaving aside kings and the like, where the stories are again only known from canonical origins)? Do you know the name of any of your ancestors from 4,000 years ago? The name of the place they lived in?
We have writing now though. There is much less need to spend time memorizing the oral history of your family line when it can be written down.
At a time when anything you don't teach your children and grandchildren would be lost forever, it was much more important to pass on the stories of your ancestors through oral histories.
Genesis is but one example of an oral folklore. All cultures had them (before writing ... which invented forgetting, ref Socrates). i would not at all be surprised if their cladogram is pushed back in time to when we shared the earth with other Homo species
> The identity of Apidima 1 could also cast doubt on other archaeological finds from Europe, such as stone tools with no accompanying fossils. Researchers had long assumed that within a certain time window, “any archaeology was all the work of Neanderthals,” says Wragg Sykes. But if modern humans also occupied this “safe range,” which species actually created those artifacts?
> Homo Erectus: 1 million B.C. to about 500,000 B.C.
Can you imagine the period of sheer..uneventfulness?
It's an indescribable unease for me, imagining a planet where nothing really happens, just animals doing their thing... Even worse if you're a semi-sapient species, with just enough awareness to know that things could be better, but not seeing any improvement in your entire life..
I mean, imagine us staying basically the same for the next 50 years, with nothing really changing in human society, let alone a 100 years, let alone a 1000...
> there were multiple species of humans in existence, of which only one survived
If there were other sentient species on this planet co-existing with us, we probably killed them all.
Absolutely, things moved at a glacial pace back then... literally... since the Pleistocene (2.5 million BC to 11,700 BC) encompassed several ice age pulses -- freezes and thaws, over tens of thousands of years. We're currently in the thawing period of the latest ice age, by the way.
The ice ages, by the way, would have been quite intense. Over 1/3 of the Earth was covered by frozen ice caps, extending down past Britain to central Germany in Europe, and the Kansas region in the U.S. Imagine if the Arctic were that large. The habitable zones were commensurately smaller, the warm seasons were shorter, and oppressive winters were the norm. People anywhere near the ice caps would have had to adapt to the intense cold, both physiologically and technologically. If you didn't have fire and the means to hunt and take down large fur coated mammals on a regular basis, you died.
It's amazing to think that Homo Erectus, the dominant hominid circa 1 million BC, had fire and tools. They were far less advanced than H. Sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis, had smaller brains and smaller physical stature, but would have been fearsomely strong and fast nonetheless.
After half a million years, Erectus gave rise to more advanced species so some kind of change and adaptation was occurring, albeit slowly.
and imagine traveling from 2019 to 2119. It will probably be almost unrecognizable to us.
My daughter was born in 2004; she might live to 2119. Almost certainly, barring accidents, will live to see the 22nd Century. I only hope that she'll like it. There are so many dystopian predictions -- nanotech killers, evil AI, war.... I just pray that the world she and future generations inherit will be worth living in.
Homo Erectus: 1 million B.C. to about 500,000 B.C.
Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens split off from common ancestor: 500,000 B.C.
Homo Sapiens dominate Africa until about 70,000 B.C. when they spread into Europe, Middle East, and Asia.
Neanderthals dominate Europe, Middle East, and Asia, until 70,000 B.C. when Homo Sapiens return out of Africa.
There are a few other variations of humans in the 300KYA to 70KYA period, including: Denisovans (found in Siberia and other places), the "hobbits" found in Indonesia.
It's possible and likely that around 100KYA, there were several species of humans cohabiting the earth, including modern humans (H. sapiens), Neanderthals, Denisovans, a few remaining H. Erectus, the hobbits, and some mixtures of the above.
Each discovery sheds new light and sometimes, as with this possible modern human skull, shatters old theories about the timeline.
It's fascinating to think that at one time in the not-too-distant past, there were multiple species of humans in existence, of which only one survived, though most non-African humans today carry 2-4% Neanderthal genes, so in a sense, some traits of the Neanderthals survived. We are the Neanderthals.
It's time we stopped using the term "Neanderthal" as an insult. They were possibly as smart as modern humans, had larger brains, had tools, ritual burial, weapons technologies, and art work. Their anatomical structure indicates that likely they had language. It's possible that they were gentler than H. Sapiens which would explain how they got gobbled up and made extinct, despite their vast strength (Neanderthals bone structure and muscle attachments indicate that they were many times stronger than modern humans.)