Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello viewers and we have reached a momentous milestone, I've been given a plastic chair
to sit on as a reward for a year of contributing to head squeeze and we now have a quarter
of a million subscribers, 250,000 people! How about that!
And as a result we've themed some 250,000 related questions, experiments and what have
you and mine is Are humans really 250,000 years old?
Well possibly.
We can't be sure, because we've yet to find a neatly dated diary entry from the first
modern human: 'Tuesday, woke up. Skinned a woolly mammoth and made underpants.'
In fact, all discussion for the exact date of humanity's arrival onto the planet is made
with a margin of error of several tens of thousands of years.
Let's start at the beginning.
Primates -- the biological order of which we're part -- started to evolve separately
from other mammals around 85 million years ago.
Hominini, our bit of the family tree, separated from chimpanzees -- our last common ancestor
of another species -- about five and a half million years ago.
The genus *** -- stop sniggering at the back -- which includes modern humans, first appeared
about 2.3 million years ago. This marked the point at which our brains started to get significantly
bigger, with *** heidelbergensis -- who arrived between 1.3 million and 600,000 years ago
- having a cranial capacity similar to our own. This was also when our distant ancestors
evolved the ability to use tools, although -- to judge from the number of stone age axe-heads
left lying around the world -- not the ability to tidy up after themselves.
*** sapiens -- modern humans with the opposable thumb that was to become so useful for texting
-- first evolved in Africa between 250,000 and 200,000 years ago, and started to travel
around the world shortly afterwards. That's short in evolutionary timescales, at least.
We arrived in Eurasia about 125,000 years ago, Australia about 40,000 years ago, the
Americas 15,000 years ago and New Zealand less than a thousand years ago: recently enough
that some early immigrants are still waiting for their luggage.
For a long time we lived alongside other members of the *** genus. And, indeed, often seemed
to do slightly more than that, with evidence that European *** Sapiens cross-bred with
Neanderthals -- with whom we had diverged as a separate species about 400,000 years
ago.
But there was clearly as much violence as sex, with all other members of the *** family
apart from *** Sapiens having died out by around 30,000 years ago. This could well be
because humans achieved what anthropologists refer to as behavioural modernity around 50,000
years ago. This meant that we were using more complex languages, building more advanced
weapons and then painting pictures in caves to show our awesome hunting skills, and how
good we looked in our underpants. And our prey likely included the other types of early
man.
We developed agriculture and learned animal husbandry about 12,000 years ago. And the
rest is just history.
Except it isn't, not quite. Technically it's pre-history, the time before we had written
records. We only moved into what's generally regarded as being history, and gained the
ability to keep an accurate record, about 5700 years ago when the very first Cuneiform
writing appeared. Or to put it another way, *** sapiens have been walking the planet
for 0.15% of the earth's 4.54 billion year history. And we've got some form of written
record for less than one thousandth (0.085%) of mankind's existence. 250,000 years? In
fact, it's just the twinkling of an eye.