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In the
previous
lesson, we saw
that for more than 2 million years, earth was populated by a number of human
species, not just by one. We also saw that all these human species
were unimportant animals with only a small impact on the ecosystem around them.
Then about 70,000 years ago, something changed.
One particular human specie, our specie, Homo sapiens, spread out of East Africa.
Settled the entire world.
Drove to extinction all the other human species, and became the most powerful
animal and most important animal on planet earth.
How did this happen?
What is the sapiens secret of success?
It is not easy to answer this
question because Homo Sapians has actually been around for
much more than just 70,000 years and previous
to that date, it didn't do anything special.
Sapians living
in East Africa, say about a 100,000 years ago.
Already looked just like us.
They had bodies similar to ours.
If you put them in jeans and t-shirts you
couldn't tell the difference between them and modern people.
And if you took a dead body of a sapiens from about one hundred thousand years ago
and you gave a modern doctor, a modern anatomist to dissect and analysis and
look inside, look in it.
He couldn't tell that there was anything different between
[UNKNOWN]
bodies and our bodies. Even the brains of people a
100,000 years ago were the same as ours in both size and
external shape. Yet, these archaic sapiens from a 100 to
120,000 years ago, they did not produce. Any
sophisticated tool. They did not accomplish any special feats.
And they did not enjoy any marked advantage over the other human
species around like the Neanderthals or the Erectus or a Homo Denisova.
In fact, when some ancient sapiens migrated for
the first time to the Middle East about 100,000
years ago, they were driven back by the Neanderthals
who were the local population in the Middle East
we have evidence.
We found the remains of sapiens in various sites in Middle East
mainly around what is today Israel and Palestine, and Jordan, and Lebanon.
We have evidence that sapiens actually reached for this, for the first
time these areas about a 100,000 years ago and not 70,000 years ago.
And after some time the remains of the sapiens
disappear And we find, and we continue to find only Neanderthal remains.
So these leads most scholars to agree that sapiens made the
first attempt to migrate from East Africa to towards
the Middle East, about a 100,000 years ago and during that first encounter
between sapiens and Neanderthals, the Neanderthals were better.
They were more powerful, they were more adaptive
to the environment and they won.
And the sapiens disappeared from the Middle
East and stayed only in East Africa.
However, 30,000 years later, which is about 70,000 years ago, something amazing
happened to Homo sapiens and it then began doing very special things not only
in East Africa but spreading from there and settling all over the world.
The first amazing thing, the first evidence we have, that something truly
remarkable was happening to sapiens about 70,000 years ago is that,
at that time, sapiens bands left Africa for a second time.
Not all the sapiens.
Some sapiens stayed behind in East Africa. But some sapiens bands
around 70,000 years ago.
Again, migrated from East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East.
And this time, they drove the Neanderthal and all the other human species,
not only for the Middle East but from the face of the Earth.
Droves them to complete extinction.
Within a remarkably short time, sapiens managed to settle not only
the Middle East but also Europe, and
Central Asia, and South Asia, and East Asia.
sapiens reached China and Korea about 60,000 years ago.
About 45,000 years ago sapiens did something even more remarkable.
They crossed the open sea and landed in Australia.
A continent to which no previous human species
have managed to reach. No, no previous species.
No, no, no, not the Erectus, not the Neanderthal.
Nobody reached Australia until sapiens landed on
the Australian beach about 45,000 years ago.
Later on sapiens spread to another continent which no previous human reached.
Which is the continent of America.
No previous human species reached America before
sapiens did it about 15,000 years ago, 15, 1, 5
thousand years ago. These were extraordinary achievements.
because in order to reach Australia, sapiens, they couldn't
swim to Austrlia, they had to somehow cross the ocean.
And in order to reach America, sapiens had first
to find out how to survive in the very, very cold arctic climate of
Northern Siberia and Alaska, where temperatures drop
to minus 50 degrees Celsius in winter.
Because this is how sapiens reached America from Siberian Alaska.
So in order to reach America, sapiens coming from East
Africa, first had to find out how you can survive in
Siberia and Alaska. In order to settle all these places,
Europe, Asia, Australia, America. Sapiens had to adopt very, very quickly.
Quickly in evolutionary terms, to completely new ecological conditions.
As you remember, sapiens evolved for the first time in East Africa.
And lived in East Africa
for 100,00 or 200,000 years. And sapiens were, was very well adapted to
the warm climate of the African Savannah. And to the other ecological conditions.
To the animals of African savanna, to the plants of
African savanna, to the geography, to the topography, and so fort.
But once sapiens begins spreading over the world, they had within a few thousand
years To adapt themselves to complely new conditons.
The same sapiens, basically the same sapiens, who lived for tens of
thousands of years in East Africa, suddenly you find them in Russia.
You find them in India.
You find them in New Guinea.
And they had to adapt to living in the very
cold conditions of Russia or in the jungles of New Guinea.
Even though for hundreds of thousands
of years, they have been adapting to the very different conditions of East Africa.
So, this is the first indication that something truly amazing
was happening to Homo sapiens beginning about 70,000 years ago.
And this is that sapiens suddenly spread.
All over the world and not only spread all over the world,
but some how managed to adapt to completely
new ecological conditions within a very, very short time.
The second indication that something truly amazing was happening to Homo
sapiens about 70,000 years ago, was the appearance of new technologies.
one of the most important technologies to appear, to start appearing around 70,000
years ago is probably boats or other kinds of sailing craft.
As I mentioned earlier, around 45,000 or 50,000 years ago,
sapiens for the first time, reached the continent of Australia.
Which no previous human specie has managed to do.
And it was a very, eh, eh, difficult thing to
do because in order to reach Australia from Southeast Asia
you some how had to cross the ocean and it's
a big, it's quite a big gap separating the two.
You couldn't swim there, even if you knew that Australia is waiting for you.
And how could you know that if you've never been there?
So most scholars estimate that around that time
45,000, 50,000 years ago. Sapiens in Southeast Asia in what is today
Indonesia, in the island of Indonesia. They already developed some kind of
sailing craft or boats or rafts and also began developing a sea faring society.
A society of people who were used to sailing, to sailing on the sea.
And this is how they reached Australia, and later
on reached other islands, like Japan and Taiwan and
so forth.
So this was one very important invention the boat or the sailing craft.
Another very important invention, which we begin to see in the,
in archaeological record about 40, 50 thousand years ago is the needle.
Now, this may not strike as you as a
particularly revolutionary invention, the needle, but the needle was actually
one of the most important inventions in the whole of, whole history of human kind.
What was so important about needles.
Well, well people were able to make all kinds
of, of cloth even before the invention of the needle.
Like Neanderthals, apparently also had some kind of clothing.
They killed a bear or they killed some, some,
and a deer and they took the skin or the
fur and put it, put it on them to, to to warm themselves This is something that
previous human species could do. But they could not sew things together.
Because they didn't have needles and, and, and it couldn't be done.
Once sapiens invented needles, sapiens were able to
start sewing and making all kinds of, of new things.
New clothes especially thermal thermal clothes.
Which were made from layers of fur eh, inter spaced with layers
of skin sewn close together with the help of needles, and
they could start making all kinds of boots and tents and, and things like this.
And this was the key for the sapiens, settlement of very cold
areas like Siberia and Alaska.
Even the Neanderthals were very well adapted to living in ice age Europe.
They were unable to move into Scandinavia or into
eh, Northern Siberia because it was too cold for them.
But sapiens was adapted to the hot conditions of Africa
did manage to settle Siberia because they had the needle and
they could sew these tents and boots and thermal outfits and, and things like that.
Another interesting invention that people that sapiens
probably made around that time is oil lamps.
small lamps made of stone or clay, in which
sapiens put the fat of animals that they hunted.
And then lighted it and they had a lamp. And this is
how they were able not only to crawl into
all kinds of caves but also to produce magnificent art.
On the walls of the caves the famous cave paintings.
Well think about it, how could they, okay,
they could crawl into caves even without light.
But, how to produce amazing pictures on the walls.
And what's the purpose of producing them if you can't see them?
Unless you have light.
And these oil lamps, which arcahologists have, have found the remains of,
of a few of these oil lamps from 40, 50,000 years ago.
Were the key to this artistic revolution.
One of the keys to this artistic revolution.
aside from the invention of a new technology.
Like the oil lamp and the boat and the and the needle.
There were also, also constant development of all technology.
Like stone knives and spear points, and hammers, and axes, and things like that.
Previously, up to about 70,000 years ago
we find that people, Neanderthals, Erectus, were making,
and also sapiens, were making exactly the
same tools, exactly the same, say, spear points
for hundred of thousands of years without change.
From about 70,000 years ago onwards we begin to see continuous change.
In the technology of things like spear points.
Every few thousands of hundreds of years, you have
a new style of spear points or of knives.
So this is another thing that, that
happened, not only the invention of completely
new technolgy, but the continuous improvement.
Of all technology.
During the same period, beginning 70,000 years ago.
We also have the first evidence for art and for jewelry.
We find the first evidence for trade between different bands.
We'll speak about it later on.
We find the first evidence for complex societies.
Societies comprising hundreds of people, and not just dozens of people.
And we find the first evidence of religion.
As an example look at this remarkable ivory
statue made by sapiens in Germany about 30,000 years ago.
What do you see? You see a lion man or lioness woman.
It's, it's a bit difficult it would tell the gender.
But it's very clear that the body of whatever is depicted in the statue.
The body is human.
Whereas the head is the head of a lion or a lioness.
This is one of the earliest pieces of evidence.
Not only for art, but also for the ability of sapiens to imagine things that don't
really exist.
There weren't any lion man alive in Germany about 30,000 years ago.
There was nowhere that the artists who have made
this statue could have seen a lion man.
Lion men only existed only in the fertile imagination of sapiens.
How to account for this wave of invention, new inventions and
changes, and technological revolutions.
How to account for the sudden appearance of art and religion and
the new political structures and perhaps, above all, how to account for the
quick spreading of sapiens over the entire world, the extinctions of the other
human species and the settlement of new territories like Australia and America.
Well, most scholars believe
that all these achievements were the result
of a revolution in sapiens' cognitive abilities.
What are the cognitive abilities?
Well, cognitive abilities are the abilities to
communicate, to remember to learn, to think.
These are all the cognitive abilities. It seems that sapiens who lived
100,000 years ago in East Africa, they may have looked exactly like us.
And they may have had brains the same size and shape external shape as our brains
but they had very different, more limited, cognitive abilities.
They could not talk and think
like you and me.
They, they talk and they thought in some way but in
a much more restricted and less sophisticated way than you and me.
In contrast the people who drove the Neanderthals to extinction
about 30,000 years ago, the people who settled the continent
of Australia for the first time, and the people who
calmed the Stael lion man, already talked and thought like
you and me.
They did not talk and think in English, they had their own language but
in, in the basic abilities of thinking and talking, they were like you and me.
The disappearance of new ways of talking and thinking, between about 70,000 years
ago and about 30,000 years ago, is called the cognitive revolution.
The first
big revolution of history basically the revolution that started history.
Prior to the cognitive revolution humans were no different from any other animal.
They had biology and not history.
History begins with the cognitive revolution.
Now how to explain this revolution.
After all, there was as I said before, there was no big change in the body
of sapiens.
there was not even any significant change in the
size or in the external shape of the sapiens brain.
So how to account for the fact that without any any change that
we can see in the body or the brain, suddenly there appeared amazing
new cognitive abilities. Well, scholars, most scholars,
believe that there must have been some relatively small change.
In the internal structure of the brain, not in the size or external shape but in
the internal structure of the brain that led
to all the big revolutions in sapiens' abilities.
Perhaps, this is just a theorist speculation.
We don't have any firm evidence, but it's the best speculation we have.
Perhaps there were some relative, relatively
small genetic mutation that caused two parts
of the brain, which were previously
separate separated to connect to each other.
And this resulted in all the new amazing cognitive abilities.
Now, it's just a theory.
We don't really know it for sure because there are no
frozen brains from 50,000 years ago and 100,000
years ago that we can compare to each other.
But it's the best theory we have at the present.
If we accept this.
That there was some small change in the internal structure of the brain.
how to account for it?
Or more precisely, how to account for the
fact that this, remarkable change happened to sapiens.
And not to Neanderthals or Denisovans or some
other human species or some other animal species.
As far as we know it was pure chance that, that might well have been the result of
some tiny biological reaction in sapiens DNA that lead to the, to the mutation.
And if this tiny biochemical a, a, a
reaction did not take place, then human may
well have remained insignificant animals to this day or
the world today might have been governed by Neanderthals.
And the sapiens would've become extinct.
So we don't really know, we don't have a good answer why this
change happened to sapiens and not to Neanderthals.
And also, we don't have a very clear theory about what was the biological and
the more logical factors that lead to the whole cognitive change.
But this is less important for our purposes.
What is very important for understanding human history
is to understand what exactly was the change in sapiens cognitive abilities.
What was so special about the new way in which sapiens
thought and talked?
What was so special about the new sap, sapiens language?
This is what we will discuss throughout all
the next parts of the this entire lesson.
We'll try to understand what is so special about the way that we sapiens think and
talk and how is it different from the
way all other animals and Neanderthals and chimpanzees
think and talk.
In other words, these, all the other sections of this lesson will be
dedicated to understanding what is so special about our language.
In order to answer this question.
In the next segments, we will discuss not only the world of the Stone
Age but also the world today, which is more familiar to most of you.
In order again to understand what is so special about our language that has
made us the masters of the world
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