Nobody Cares about Pre-History

[Beebo Brink]

A new thread for news about early humans and paleolithic times.

This video seems like an appropriate beginning: A fascinating look at a 6 million year old hominid fossil that is upturning our origin story. This ape learned to balance (a precursor to bipedalism) by living in the trees, similar to the way orangutans also climb and walk. So bipedalism may have come BEFORE we ventured out into the grasslands that began to encroach on African forests (due to climate change).

 

[Free]

Recommendation: Stefan Milo's (Milosavljevich) youtube channel

Stefan covers a lot of stuff around archaeology, anthropology and human evolution. He's a UK transplant living in the US, and I find his offbeat style and no-nonsense approach to dealing with "Atlantean" sorts refreshing. A good example of his videos:

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

Recommendation: Stefan Milo's (Milosavljevich) youtube channel

Stefan covers a lot of stuff around archaeology, anthropology and human evolution. He's a UK transplant living in the US, and I find his offbeat style and no-nonsense approach to dealing with "Atlantean" sorts refreshing. A good example of his videos:

Considering that the one atlantis type lost me when he decided to 'prove' Carole Baskins murdered her husband, real history will be refreshing.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Considering that the one atlantis type lost me when he decided to 'prove' Carole Baskins murdered her husband, real history will be refreshing.

LOL, yeah... I have a coworker who is a great, fun guy, and a great worker. ...but he takes some of the kooks from the Joe Rogan Experience too seriously and is a bit too "open minded" with crap like that.

 

[danielravennest]

LOL, yeah... I have a coworker who is a great, fun guy, and a great worker. ...but he takes some of the kooks from the Joe Rogan Experience too seriously and is a bit too "open minded" with crap like that.

It's good to have an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out -- Albert Einstein

 

[Beebo Brink]

My mother's ancestors supposedly arrived in Oaxaca some 14,000 years ago, approximately 6,000 years after humans first reached North America. Those dates, however, keep getting pushed back farther and farther as new archeological discoveries emerge. Just how and when people arrived in the Americas is still a fascinating, but shifting story.

The Story of How Humans Came to the Americas Is Constantly Evolving

Surprising new clues point to the arrival taking place thousands of years earlier than previously believed

www.smithsonianmag.com

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Both genetic and linguistic evidence point to earlier settlement in waves. Archeologists are starting to catch up but between raising seawater and catastrophic events at the end of the ice age like the Missoula Floods much of the evidence is probably destroyed or inaccessible.

 

[Free]

A 40,000-year-old Chinese stone tool culture unlike any other

Not every culture left a mark on those around it.

arstechnica.com

The people who lived at Xiamabei, in northern China's Niwehan Basin, used a toolkit that consisted mostly of tiny bladelets (small, sharp pieces of stone), often hafted onto bone handles. Based on microscopic traces of wear and tear on the tools, people at Xiamabei seemed to have used the same generic bladelets for everything from scraping hides and cutting meat to boring wood and whittling softer plant matter.

Nearly every one of the 382 stone tools unearthed at Xiamabei is less than four centimeters long; making and using these smaller blades would have allowed early humans to do more work with less material. Handles helped make the tools easier to grip and more versatile; Wang and his colleagues found one bladelet with part of a bone haft still attached to the stone. On several of the 17 other bladelets the researchers examined closely for microscopic signs of wear, they found tiny scratches left by bone handles, along with imprints from the plant fibers used to bind the bladelets in place.

The result, as Wang and his colleagues put it, is a "complex technical system" completely different from what any other group of people—whether Homo sapiens, Neanderthal, or Denisovan—used at the time.

Cool.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Ancient DNA helps reveal social changes in Africa 50,000 years ago that shaped the human story

While genetic evidence supports a major demographic transition in Africa after 50,000 years ago, we still don’t know the key drivers.

bigthink.com

 

[Beebo Brink]

My mother's ancestors supposedly arrived in Oaxaca some 14,000 years ago, approximately 6,000 years after humans first reached North America.

Speaking of my Zapotec ancestors:

Researchers Decipher the Glyphs on a 1,300-Year-Old Frieze in Mexico

The 50-foot-long limestone and stucco relief contains one of the lengthiest examples of Zapotec writing in the Oaxaca Valley

www.smithsonianmag.com

 

[Beebo Brink]

This Beautiful Reconstruction of a Stone Age Woman Feels Almost Like Time Travel

A Stone Age woman who lived 4,000 years ago is leaning on her walking stick and looking ahead as a spirited young boy bursts into a run, in a stunning life-size reconstruction now on display in Sweden.

www.sciencealert.com

 

[Isabeau]

This Beautiful Reconstruction of a Stone Age Woman Feels Almost Like Time Travel

A Stone Age woman who lived 4,000 years ago is leaning on her walking stick and looking ahead as a spirited young boy bursts into a run, in a stunning life-size reconstruction now on display in Sweden.

www.sciencealert.com

Stone Age seems so long ago, yet I can trace back all my family from the first who came here from France in the early 1600’s. And this is the “New World”. I think it’s something like 11 or 13 generations I forget, I’d have to check. Anyway, not that long of a time period. Multiply that a few times and it’s Jesus time period. Then double that and you get the Stone Age.

I know I’m simplifying but still, it just seems such a short time compared to the planet’s history.

When we go extinct, in the not too distant future the way things are going, we’ll just have been a tiny blip.

I wonder if future beings will reconstruct a 21st century women, lying in bed with a phone in her hand. They may have to also guess at the colour of her eyes and hair, and maybe they’ll try and reconstruct her features to give her a worried/pessimistic outlook.

“Here we have in this glass enclosure a middle aged woman at the start of the Calamitous Age. Typical of the many who lived then, she lived alone and communicated through this device whilst lying in a plush bed, in her underwear. We have added a few crumbs here and there from a snack she may have eaten earlier for realism, along with a loyal companion of Felis catus domesticus at her feet.”

 

[Beebo Brink]

Stone Age seems so long ago, yet...

Over the past few years, I've grown more and more fascinated by Stone Age humans (and the tool-wielding hominids that came before them). They managed to not only survive for hundreds of thousands of years, but to actually thrive with the materials that were literally lying on the ground around them. The humans who first worked their way through the Americas were faced with short-faced bears, mammoths, giant sloths and saber-toothed tigers (oh my!).

I sometimes opine darkly that the catastrophes of this centuries will send us back to the Stone Age, but I seriously doubt the ability of modern humans to adapt to life without cellphones and electricity. In the space of 200-300 years, the majority of us have jettisoned the birthright of our species. Except for scattered (and beleaguered) indigenous populations, we've wiped our minds of knowledge accumulated over the past million years. I suspect it's a Devil's bargain.

 

[Chalice Yao]

Over the past few years, I've grown more and more fascinated by Stone Age humans (and the tool-wielding hominids that came before them). They managed to not only survive for hundreds of thousands of years, but to actually thrive with the materials that were literally lying on the ground around them
...
I sometimes opine darkly that the catastrophes of this centuries will send us back to the Stone Age, but I seriously doubt the ability of modern humans to adapt to life without cellphones and electricity.

I am sure that the pure need for survival would make us re-adapt - but it certainly would be only a chunk of the existing populance today.
Which is fine - the population would decline to more natural levels once more.

But: The big thing that we did since then is: Change the world pretty much completely in terms of flora and fauna. our entire environs. Virtually everything from the cover of plant life to available animal species and populations down to animal behaviors.

I think that is the real problem.

If you made a what-if scenario of wiping current culture off the planet with a fingersnip and placed ye olde stone-age people onto our planet as they once were, I think in many areas of the world they'd not be able survive at all like they once did. The population would probably become tiny and collected in areas of the world that are most suitable to a naturalistic lifestyle still, until the planet has recovered and nature has regained its normal foothold in many areas.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I am sure that the pure need for survival would make us re-adapt - but it certainly would be only a chunk of the existing populance today.
Which is fine - the population would decline to more natural levels once more.

But: The big thing that we did since then is: Change the world pretty much completely in terms of flora and fauna. our entire environs. Virtually everything from the cover of plant life to available animal species and populations down to animal behaviors.

That's a really good point, and one I'd never really given much thought to. My attention has always been on the loss of metal, coal, and oil resources, and not so much the changed landscapes. When humans and Neanderthals roamed Europe, they were following large herds of animals or fishing from the shores. In the Americas, there were vast plains of buffalo. All those natural resources have been severely depleted and altered.

As you alluded to, even after the Great Dying, humans will probably adapt because we're really good generalists, but it's going to be a rough road for quite a long while.

 

[Sid]

The world has something we humans don't really have: time.
We might act like we are the overlords. But in the end it will be just very temporary, for each one of us personally and for us as a specie.
A few million years is nothing for the world.
And when this dominant burden (we) is over and there is a period with no dominant species, the earth will recover and diversify very quickly again (measured in earth time that is).

If it ever grows another overlord type it is unlikely they will know much more about the homo sapiens than we know about the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Impressive knowledge at first glance, but in fact we know only very little about them for sure. Not even the structure or the color of their skins.

 

[Chalice Yao]

Amusingly enough, we humans have a loooooooot of time as well.

The stone age ended about ~3000 to 4000 years ago, yes. But Homo Sapiens - the folks belonging to the species you see out there in the streets - arrived in the picture around 200000 years ago.

We have a huge, huge gap of knowledge regarding ourselves in that timspan, sadly. But we, as we are today - not our Homo predecessor species but plain 'everyday humans', with the same brains, motivations, capacity for reasoning and instincts - have been around for 200k years. Kind of crazy to think about.
It also puts our technological explosion in the last 1000 years (Not to mention last 200 years) in perspective.

But large timespans are hard to conceptualize in the first place. People have this image of the universe being ancient - and it is for the timespans we handle daily. But life on earth?
The existance of life on earth is about *one third* as old as the very universe itself.

A theory about why we have not seen any signs of alien life yet is pretty simple: We are damn early on an universal scale. Life, on an universal timeline, could not have happened and developed much earlier than on our planet. *We'll* be the ones that get seen someday.
Or, you know, not, because by then we might be gone as one of the universe's first big failures of the evolutionary high-intelligence life coincidences.

 

[Chalice Yao]

On a more amusing note, humans always human'd (clicky):

Graffitti in acient Pompeji (Not pre-history, but you bet we always did this in some form or another):

Humans gotta human:

Humans gonna human in every way:

 

[Chalice Yao]

And last but not least, an interesting article about Ötzi's clothes:

Here's What the Iceman Was Wearing When He Died 5,300 Years Ago

New DNA study of ancient clothing reveals that Otzi the European mummy "shopped" locally.

www.nationalgeographic.com

 

[Chalice Yao]

And a good rough estimate of the timeline of us, and our predecessors, including when some things proooobably developed:

Timeline: Human Evolution

Five skulls belonging to some ancestors and relatives of modern humans. From left to right, the skulls are: Australopithecus africanus (3-1.8 mya); Homo habilis (or H. rudolfensis, 2.1-1.6 mya); Homo erectus (or H. ergaster, 1.8-0.3 mya, although the ergaster classification is generally...

www.newscientist.com

Of note is:
150000 BC - "Humans possibly capable of speech. 100,000-year-old shell jewellery suggests that that people develop complex speech and symbolism"

Personally I think it's not just 'possibly', given that Homo Sapiens hit around 200k-175k years ago. We have a developed speech center, so we were probably talking around that time already.

A kicker is:
140000 BC - "First evidence of long-distance trade"

33000 BC - Oldest cave art found so far