The beginning of Humanity

Great Debates
1

In another thread, it was suggested that humanity is 400,000 years old, since that is the estimate of how long the species homo sapiens has been around. I am no anthropologist, but I have heard many times that what we call humanity has been around about 50,000 years. This is because all of the other classifications of homo sapiens were significantly different from Cro-Magnon man, or Modern Man, that they weren’t really considered as part of our history.

Jmullaney, you made a reference in that other thread that alluded to the fact that the differences between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons and the other stages of homo sapiens were like the differences between the races of today. I think you are confusing things - those classifications have nothing to do with how races are classified today; at least, no one has tried to make any analogy there that I have seen.

So, I say humanity started 50,000 years ago; anyone agree disagree? I hope we get someone like Dr. Fidelius in here.

PeeQueue

2

Well, I admit the encyclopedia Britannica seems to be of two minds about this. Here is the entry under human beings:

However, it does not go on to list the “races”, and then elsewhere implies that modern man is all one race (homo sapiens sapiens). But then it also says neanderthal were a race of people who became extinct and were replaced in Europe by Cro-magnon, which evolved in near Asia. But, it also implies Blacks did not evolve from Cro-magnons, but came out of other races extant in Africa.

So, nice touchy subject for a great debate. If you start to say Cro-magnons are a superior race to Neanderthals, who’s to say whites aren’t superior to blacks, etc.?

3

How do you view humanity? Biologically, I would say that humanity started with the first group of beings that were close enough genetically to successfully breed with a modern Homo Sapiens. The current state of knowledge does not allow a determination of this criterion however.

Culturally, I would argue that the first humans were the first beings with a language. This of course would be impossible to determine. I would imagine that the only thing that can be determined would be the use of figurative art (cave paintings) and assume that this is related to language.

4

Art may not have survived much past 50,000 years ago. That some Cro-magnon remains that we have are from caves where are could have been well preserved doesn’t mean neanderthals were any less human for not being cave-dwellers.

5

I have never heard that humanity could be 400,000 years old. The numbers that I always have used are from 30,000 to about 150,000 years. FWIW, Cro-magnon were esentially anatomically modern Homo Sapiens. And, while Neanderthals (Homo Sapiens neandertalensis) could probably walk around today and not stick out, they didn’t develop along the same evolutionary branch as us Homo sapiens sapiens.

6

“Humanity” is a rather squishy concept. As has been pointed out, those things which make Homo sap “human” don’t tend to fossilize. The earliest appearance of language and social organization have to be inferred from skeletal evidence and garbage dumps.

That said, in my opinion our ancestors became persons around 35,000 years ago. Around tea time. Give or take.

Earlier than this, hominids made tools of increasing sophistication, and the Neandertalers started burying their dead with some signs of ceremony about 60,000 years ago. BUT, there are no clear signs of art before the Cro- Magnons started painting and carving about 35,000 years ago.

I think a case could be made that the production of artwork is a good indication of “humanity”.

(Caveat: If we find that H. ergaster made sophisticated artwork that we haven’t recognized as such yet, my opinions are subject to change. Or if I decide that singing counts as art, then I may include whales as “persons”. Whatever.)

7

Not only did they have to produce art, they had to produce art that lasted 35,000 years.

Certainly it’s reasonable to assume that some Neandertal (when did they lose the “h/”) scratched a smilie face in the dirt with a stick before a Cro-magnon said “Hey, I’m gonna crush some berries and do that in a cave where it won’t get washed away.”

Does the burial imply mourning, and does that emotion make them human? Wolves mourn, so do apes and chimps, I’ve even seen a horse do it. Does that make them human?

Tools? Well, some chimps use sticks to get termites. Are they people?

Language? WHat about dolphins and and apes and dogs? At what point do simple grunts of communication become a language?

Douglas Adams handled it like this: No civilization actually becomes people until they invent digital watches. That makes humanity about 30 years old.

As for breeding, it’s my understanding that modern man could pretty much get it on with Neandertals or any of a variety of early hominids and produce offspring (providing of course he had a snazzy car and some good pick-up lines.) Were they people? I dunno.

Odd cranial formations and blood type concentrations in certain secluded pockets of humanity have led some to suggest that Neandertalers may still be extent to some diluted degree (no cites here, just something I think I remembered from Archeology 101 at Tulane between beer-bashes.) Are they not people?

I’m going with the digital watches.

8

was the neandertal an actual “cave man”? That is, do we know enough of the neandertal behavior and habitat to presume whether they would be likely to go into caves? If we do, and they weren’t, that could be a likely reason that art they produced didn’t survive.

9

When the first bones were discovered and the location (the Neander Valley) stuck on as the name, the local spelling was Neaderthal, with a silent H. Around 100 years ago, the German-speaking countries agreed to a set of spelling reforms that dropped the silent letter. More recently, the English-speaking scientific community decided to normalize the spelling based on the current spelling in German.

(The “thal” in Neandertal is the same word/phoneme “tal” that shows up in such monetary units as “talers” and “dollars” because quite a bit of European money was minted from silver mined in a specific valley (“tal”)–I don’t remember which one at the moment.)
If memory serves me, the examples of ritual burial by the Neandertals has been found in caves, so they used caves at least some of the time.

10

If only to delight in the rare opportunity to add something to a tomndebb post, I believe the mint was called something to the effect of Joacaltaler. I probably completely bastardized it, though.

11

My thoughts on man as he exists today are posted in the Cain’s wife thread. But for those who are interested in such things, I would recommend reading Guns, Germs and Steel. i can’t remember the author at the moment, but the book results from him researching the question, Why was America invaded and colonised by Europeans with African slaves, rather than Africa being colonized by Aztecs and Apaches, with European slaves, or any other combination of facts. For a depressingly long time it was simply assumed that the white man was somehow inherently superior to everyone else. This book systematically blows that idea out of the water, pointing out, among other things, that Australia was populated in about 40,000 B.C. thus making Australian Aborigines the first people group to manage open water navigation. Certainly a hell of a lot smarter than the shmucks who invaded later.
Just thought you guys might be interested.

12

I’m impressed with the scholarship to date. I turned what had been posted up until Scylla’s post over to my wife, who took a degree in paleoanthropology four years ago, and here are her comments:

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Depending on how you define it (him? her? them?), humanity (I prefer the term “mankind”) could be anywhee from 4.2 million to 10,000 years old. Alan Wilson and Vincent Sarish, from their “mitochondrial Eve” research in the 70s, “proved” that mankind dates back to a single female ancestor living somewhere in East Africa about 150,000 years ago. No thanks, I just had a bar of soap! [She is referring here to the less-than-perfect methodology used to establish the Mitochondrial Eve theory.]

To aswer the question that seems to be being asked here, “recognizably human beings” (and even that terminology is debatable) have been around for just shy of a hundred thousand years. Excavations at the Klasies River mouth at the extreme tip of South Africa, and Skhul and Qafzeh in the Middle East, have revealed fossils of crania that have modern characteristics. Radiometric dating techniques yield dates in excess of 90,000 years B.P. for these sites.

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It all depends on how you define “man” as well. Here are some dates for various species:

Ardipithecus ramidus (first known member of family Hominidae): ~4 MYA (million years ago)

Australopithecines (“Zinjanthropus,” “Lucy,” et al.): 3.2 - ~2 MYA

Homo habilis (first member of genus Homo)" 2.1-1.9 MYA (you will see different dates here; this is the narrow, certain range)

Homo erectus (Java and Peking man; on a “lumper” classification, Turkana Boy, also listed as Homo ergaster): ~1.9 - 0.4 MYA

Neandertal and other “archaic” forms": 700-28 KYA

Homo sapiens: 90,000 YA - present

This is done strictly on a paleontological species classification, and is based on a composite of research from the past few decades. Sources include R. Leakey, D. Johansen, A. Thorne, and others; in particular a summary article by S.J. Gould was helpful.

Oh, and Water? The mint was in the Valley of St. Joachim, or Joachimsthal; the coins were Joachimsthalers > thalers > dollars.

13

I knew this was the right place to ask. So, the date seems a little arbitrary, but it sounds like most people wouldn’t argue too much with placing it between 35,000 and 90,000 years ago.

Regarding the modern races, I was always of the assumption that they all evolved from Mr. Cro-Magnon. Does anyone know if this is true, false, or still uncertain?

PeeQueue

14

heh heh heh

Define “race.”

15

Uh, I’d object.

If you exhume the grave of a woman who died in 1854, and find a skeleton therein, it is not a reasonable assumption that she was lifted bodily into heaven and a wandering gypsy woman who conveniently died at the same time was buried in her place to keep the neighbors from talking.

If anatomically modern human skeletons are radiometrically dated to a range of 90,000-100,000 years ago, the only reasonable assumption is that they were the skeletons of anatomically modern men (and women and children – “men” as anthropoi, not androi).

I would suggest that “race” in any modern sense of the word is virtually impossible to tell from remains. Racial differences, which of course do exist – it’s only the conclusions racist bigots draw from them that are invalid – are so far as I know confined to soft tissue. Things like height, skull shape, and so on lie across racial classification boundaries, not within them.

16

But, neanderthals were homo sapiens, “archaic” form or not.

It appears modern Asians are related to neither the Neanderthal or the Cro-Magnon races:

(from here)

17

Joel, on this one you pays your money and you takes your cherce.

Lumpers about 20 years ago suggested that Neandertals were members of the subspecies Homo sapiens neandertalensis with adaptations for Ice Age Europe. Present-day paleoanthropologists tend more to be splitters and, while not going back to the Virchovian hunchback image, suggest they were a separate species, Homo neandertalensis. (My wife disagrees, but has inadequate evidence to do a paper as yet.) There is common consent that they were not on the direct lineage of modern man.

By the way, a couple of “race” points:
[li]Earlier Neandertals, largely in the Middle East (“Levantine” Neandertals), showed fewer physiological differences from modern man than did the later. The flat “pie plate with a protrusive nose” face was, however, characteristic.[/li]With the limited possible exception of the Guanches of the Canary Islands, it is unlikely modern man descends from the Cro-Magnon, who were a specialized adaptation as well. Their skull structure is substantially different from almost every population now occupying areas where they flourished.

18

Jared Diamond is the author. He places the divergence of the modern homo sapiens from homo erectus somewhere about half a million years ago (or 500,000 B.C.). He notes, however, that there is probably no way to really say X was the date that “Man” emerged due to the non-linear way that evolution works.

19

Isn’t there some distinction between ancient H. sapiens and modern H. sapiens (i.e., H. sapiens sapiens)? Perhaps the former is from 100,000 y.a. and the latter is from circa 35,000 y.a.

20

I guess Polycarp already answered my question - - oops.