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Early Human Fossil Hunting · Acedra
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0:01
in the early 1920s a fossil hunting team from the American Museum of Natural History working in the GOI desert was disappointed to report that they discovered dinosaur remains While most paleontologists would consider this a massive success to these researchers the fossils represented a failure because they hadn't been trying to find dinosaurs at all they'd actually been searching for fossils much closer to home instead fossils of the earliest humans and those dinosaurs only showed
0:31
that they were looking in the wrong place and in the wrong geologic time period meanwhile other people were also hunting for a singular so-called cradle of humankind everywhere from Europe to the islands of Southeast Asia to imaginary lost continents and the reason they were all over the map literally was because at the time scientists had no idea where to look for ancient humans they just had no clue where Humanity had begun and it would take decades before they realized that maybe there wasn't
1:01
just one cradle maybe they'd been asking the wrong question all [Music] along today humans are pretty much everywhere on every single continent worldwide and this basic fact that we take for granted raises a unique problem see when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 he predicted that evolution by natural selection would eventually shed light on human history and uncover the details of our Origins but there was no light yet no fossil evidence of human evolution that
1:35
was widely recognized so when it first occurred to scientists to start looking for the fossilized remains of our ancestors they had to guess where they should look and they had no hints to go on other primates like chimpanzees and gorillas for example are found in more restricted areas or at least on a single continent Africa so a search for the fossils of their ancestors should probably begin in Africa for orangutans the same would be true for Asia but for us it's messy because we're everywhere
2:07
the question was wide open where did our lineage evolve after diverging from our common ancestor with chimps which we now know happened about 6 to 7 million years ago early on some scientists theorized that our lineage might have originated in Asia one German zoologist even hypothesized that humans had evolved on a now sunken continent in the Indian Ocean named lamuria this imaginary place stretched from the Southeastern shores of Africa toward India and Indonesia to
2:36
the East and would have once been connected to land via a land bridge it was supposed to have been a Tropical Paradise that would have allowed human ancestors to evolve but Darwin disagreed he thought our Origins were located in Africa because of our similarities to chimpanzees and gorillas and in contrast to the paradise idea some advocates for an African origin argued that actually the harsh environment of South Africa was the Catalyst for our ancestors evolving our humanlike features like big
3:07
brains environmental challenges and the presence of dangerous predators not Paradise led to us now it's worth noting that there were other perspectives on this topic many cultures around the world had and still have their own origin stories that differ from the ideas of these early Western scientists and the Western Scientific debates were often built on false assumptions about race and superiority a problematic theme in the science of human origin that still rears its ugly head even today the
3:39
colonial history of this field of science is why local people in Africa and Asia were often deliberately prevented from contributing to the research taking place in their own lands instead they were pushed out by westerners who centered the debates around their own fossil finds and perspectives and ultimately those old timey guys were just speculating in fact Darwin even said it was useless to speculate because a long time had passed since our Origins giving plenty of time
4:08
for migrations to happen but others speculated anyway and by the 1880s some began acting on those speculations including a Dutch anatomist Eugene DUIs who traveled to Sumatra and Java to hunt for our Origins this search resulted in the javaan fossils now known as Homo erectus and over the next few decades a series of skulls from the site of Joko Dian China found by scientists like pwin Jong added more evidence for Asia but competing discoveries from Africa and
4:39
even Europe emerging around the same time left the question wide open it wasn't until the second quarter of the 20th century that fossils started to accumulate to suggest Africa one of the most important of these is a fossil skull of a juvenile hominin discovered in 1924 in South Africa dating to around 2.8 million years ago known as the tong child the find is among the first early human fossils discovered in Africa and it helped the idea of an African origin
5:08
for our lineage become widely accepted by the 1950s since then we've found many other fossils of potential long-lost African relatives dating to either side of the tong child on the timeline of human evolution for example now we know about sahelanthropus aorin and ardipithecus they're all very early potential hom that date to a round or shortly after our Divergence from our common ancestor with chimpanzees some 6 to 7 million years ago and around 4 million years ago the genus
5:40
Australopithecus appears in Africa too which includes upwards of eight species and encompasses specimens like the tong child as well as the famous Lucy many australopithecines have also been found more recently including finds nicknamed Lucy's great-grandfather and Lucy's baby it was this genus that eventually gave gave rise to our own homo sometime around 2.5 million years ago and it was members of that genus specifically Homo erectus that seem to have first migrated
6:09
Out of Africa by about 2 million years ago eventually spreading to much of Eurasia so Darwin it seems had been right all along but while there's been very little doubt for decades now that our lineage and genus both emerged in Africa the question of where our species emerged proved much harder to pin down because earlier members of our genus made it to Eurasia well before we Homo sapiens are thought to have first appeared around 300,000 years ago so could a population of hominins have
6:41
birthed our species Homo sapiens in Eurasia rather than Africa this question was wide open throughout the late 20th century and into the early 21st with two competing hypotheses taking center stage one was called the multi-regional hypothesis and like the name suggests the basic IDE aidea is that after homins radiated within and Beyond Africa different populations in different places regularly came into contact and enter bread this kept them all very similar by mixing their various traits
7:12
into the cocktail that we now know as Homo sapiens which would mean that our species emerged not in one time and place but gradually across multiple continents in contrast the Out of Africa model proposed a very different story it argued that we can trace our species origin to a single time and place somewhere in Africa only expanding beyond that continent once we were already fully-fledged Homo sapiens the debate over which of these ideas was correct raged for decades only really
7:42
becoming clear in the last 30 years or so the genetic evidence showed that we can indeed trace the initial origins of our species to the African continent for example it's now well established that the vast majority of human genetic diversity today exist in modern African populations and this is telling because it suggests that people who are not African are descended from only a small group of people who left the continent taking just a fraction of the total human gene pool with them scientists
8:14
call this a population bottleneck so in some ways the Out of Africa hypothesis was correct but the genetic evidence also shows that when ancient Homo sapiens left Africa they interbred with our cousins the neander tals and Denise Evans in EUR Asia and because the Out of Africa hypothesis originally argued that homo sapiens replaced other populations rather than inbred with them this means aspects of the multi-regional model were right too to make things more
8:43
interesting it turns out that the Out of Africa migration around 60 to 80,000 years ago was just one of many though it was the only one that clearly left direct descendants who are still all over the world but even knowing that homo sapiens are from Africa we are still left with at least one big question if the Cradle of humankind was indeed in Africa where exactly on the continent was it after all it's a vast and ecologically diverse continent spanning thousands of miles and
9:14
containing everything from deserts to savanas to rainforests so where exactly is our childhood home well in just the last few years scientists have begun to realize that this may be the wrong question altogether because a series of recent studies used using DNA from both modern and ancient people as well as archaeological and environmental evidence have begun to paint a much more complex picture of our African origins one where we didn't actually evolve in one single population in one single
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place instead we can trace our emergence to multiple ancient populations that were scattered across Africa when environmental conditions allowed they occasionally met up and mixed their genes all contributing directly to the eventual Rise Of Us modern humans some 300,000 years ago there was no single cradle it was a continent wide play pin and instead of thinking about our Origins like a tree with a single trunk perhaps the more accurate view is a complex braided stream an intertwined
10:17
story of migrations Transitions and exchanges between various ancient populations that unfolded over vast time and space no human is an island and it turns out that this has been the case since our very earliest
10:35
days our friends over at crash course have launched a podcast and if you thought we looked into the ancient past wait until you listen to what they have in store the universe is a new limited series podcast from Crash Course where Dr Katie Mack a theoretical astrophysicist walks John Green through the history of the entire universe including the parts that haven't been written yet join John and Katie as they discuss the Big Bang Cosmic Dawn black holes and eventually the end of our
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universe it's available now on the crash course YouTube channel and wherever podcasts are available now our closest relatives the neander tals lived in Eurasia for more than 300,000 years they were expert tool makers skilled hunters and foragers and may have even created cave art so what caused The Disappearance of their population well in a way it could have been us but maybe not in the way you might have heard check out our episode why the paleo diet couldn't save the neander tals to learn
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more and thanks to this month's modern e onls Jake Hart rafhael hassa Annie and Eric Higgins John Davidson in Melanie lamb carnavale Addie Tony Dy and Juan M you can become an Ean and help us make the show at patreon.com on and as always thank you for joining me in the Adam low Studio Studio subscribe at youtube.com/ eons for more evolutionary [Music]
12:10
escapades when environmental conditions allowed they occasionally make met up and mixed their jeans what a creative way to say doing it
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