As any species continues to populate, there is always a benefit to expanding its territory because it opens up new available resources and thus reduces the chance for conflict. There is also the possibility that the climate was warmer and the northern climes less inhospitable during winter.
How common were big cats and venomous snakes in Europe in the last 1-2 million years compared to warmer areas?
Is temperate climate the most productive one in terms of animals like sheep, goats and cows feeding off the land?
I’m not schooled in this at all, but would agree with above posters that it was likely pressure from other humans and limited resources.
When your daily activity is centered around feeding yourself, competing with others for limited resources is counter productive. It still happens today with regard to jobs (jobs being an umbrella statement, that would include housing etc.)
I’ll also posit that the control of fire may have allowed humans to migrate to colder regions. Or really in any direction. Fire provides more than just warmth.
Definitely not. There was an ice age going on when humans moved out of Africa. It’s possible there was no ice age when H. erectus exited, which we are less cetain as to the exact time. But even so, the climate wouldn’t have been that much different than the current era.
I should have been clearer in my OP: When I said: “Were there benefits to humans” I should have said “Were there benefits to humanity” i.e.: Did it affect biological or cultural evolution and if so, how?
For example, there seems to be a positive relationship between lactose intolerance and warm areas*. Milk is an excellent source of nutrition which may have made the transition from hunter-gatherer to herder easier than in warm areas.
Lions were all over southern Europe and parts of Asia for a very long time.
Also, remember that in a number of locales, animals had to learn to be wary of humans. Going across the mountain or bay and finding an area that had not been visited by humans - meant that the food was plentiful and easier to catch. And when that was used up - keep moving. Advancing only 5 or 10 miles a year, and it takes maybe 1000 years to cover the whole of Asia.
This is the point - nobody set out to expand into brave new worlds - it was a matter of population pressure, following the food, or running to safety. The grass was greener and the locale safe-ier over the hill. About 70,000 years ago, give or take, it appears humans (sapiens) were a fairly intelligent ocean-going culture, which is why they followed the south coast of Asia and on to Australia despite water gaps on the order of several dozen miles.
I seem to remember reading that one big attractant was the herds of big honking prey animals in Asia Minor and the steppes during the Ice Age. Big rhinos, woolly mammoths, aurochs, bison, elk - and all of them unaccustomed to pursued by intelligent, organized hominids.
And, of course, don’t forget that some must have happened just by accident. Getting blown of course or simply lost probably accounts for most discoveries.
When a new discovery is made, the thought is not “Eureka!” It’s “That’s odd. What can I do with this?”
Not just those - the size of bison herds in North America is legendary - days for them to pass by. For a good go-to book of how fecund Nature was before the advent of human overpopulation and weapons of mass fauna destruction, I recommend Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter”. I don’t doubt before humans arrived, Asia was similarly overpopulated with juicy meat stock.
I only thought about that part because there does not really appear to be a land bridge between Africa and North and South America. So is there a common DNA finger print for natives that would appear to have made the migration via the Bering Sea, and moved ever southward through Alaska
I haven’t noticed anyone pointing out effects like the Late Pleistocene-Holocene African Humid Period and earlier cycles.
Note that “wet” probably has more do with the migration than “cold”. As an example the Caribbean has a small phytoplankton population and thus the water is crystal clear. Compare this to locations like the Salish Sea where the water is more opaque and more productive and even the Native American’s had access to food in such abundance that it gave rise to gifting societies.
There were several migrations, but it is important to point out that “colder” is often also “more fertile” if it is also wetter.
Note that while not 100% certain the Americas seem to have been populated *before * the Asian megafauna made it over so that information will just need to wait for further discoveries.
… the amount of geographical misinformation here is very impressive.
I’ve written extensively on this. I find the linked map to be misleading. Lactose tolerance (also called lactase persistence, the term used in most scientific articles) follows herders. A number of peoples who live on the periphery of the Sahara are heavily dependent on milk and so have evolved lactose persistence. I’d consider this map to be better nuanced. There are some indications that it emerged in the Middle East although it not have had to because low-lactose fermented dairy products like kefir and koumiss and yogurt were more prevalent than fluid milk straight from the cow.
In any case the pathway of lactose tolerance is extremely similar to the northwest spread of farmers and the spread of Indo-European languages and the spread of white skin tones. A primary reason seems to be the calcium absorption hypothesis.
But white skin is also a new evolutionary trick and for the same reasons. Low melatonin levels allow more absorption of sunlight and consequent rises in vitamin D production. Therefore two simultaneous mutations were required for humans to live in northern Europe.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase;21295357
In any case the pathway of lactose tolerance is extremely similar to the northwest spread of farmers and the spread of Indo-European languages and the spread of white skin tones. A primary reason seems to be the [calcium absorption hypothesis]
(Lactase persistence - Wikipedia).
But white skin is also a new evolutionary trick and for the same reasons. Low melatonin levels allow more absorption of sunlight and consequent rises in vitamin D production. Therefore two simultaneous mutations were required for humans to live in northern Europe.
[/QUOTE]
I need to clarify as our understanding on this has changed over the past few years.
Europeans from 45K-20K BP had pigmentation-associated variation similar to modern African populations. Several variants decreased due to drift and gene flow showing that the vitamin D explanation is not a hard rule despite the common historical claim.
It appears that pigmentation changes in Europe were due to:
~20%: selection
~25%: geography
remainder: ancestry
The largest changes followed selection and demographic transitions and not vitamin D and lactose tolerance was still rare among Europeans and Asians just 2000 years ago. Light skin, brown eyes, and lactose tolerance mostly seems to be from the Bronze age and traditional groups thought to have spread these features like the Yamnaya mostly could not digest raw milk as adults. For pigmentation the earlier exception is Mesolithic Scandinavia but there is increasing rates among all Holocene Europe populations from early farmers, hunter-gatherers and steppe pastoralists over time.
For the most part it was not the farmers from the Middle East who allowed for the settlement of northern Europe, they are just just one wave of the alleles that are present today. Note there are 40+ variants with skin pigmentation alone and it is not as simple as once thought.
To clarify,
*Neolithic *genomes, when domestic cattle were introduced to Europe, haven’t turned up any evidence of an increase in lactose tolerance.
It wasn’t until after the Bronze Age that lactose tolerance seems to spread across Europe and Asia but that is well past the Neolithic farming/herding changes.
I thought that one reason was because greeks and romans and most of the ancient world drank goats milk ect and not from cows because goats were cheaper and easier to manage ………
I find your posts totally confusing. It’s been three decades since I read every goddamned article on lactose intolerance in UofR’s Miner Medical Library [medical journal articles are the least comprehensible of any field that uses mostly words, primarily because of dismal writing skills) and all the anthropological articles in other campus libraries. But I kept up with new findings until this decade. Geneticists always sounded as if they were making brand new claims when everything they said confirmed the earlier findings.
It’s possible that something brand new emerged in the last five years. If so, I’d like to see some major cites. I still can’t figure out your timeline, though.
The Neolithic lasted until 3300 BC, the start of the Bronze Age. Indo-European languages had already reached Europe by that time. Let’s start with The Origins of Lactase Persistence in Europe. Yes, that was written in 2009 but it’s hard to believe that it’s all been superseded.
I’ll note that the last line, expanded through discussion is other sections, agrees that vitamin D production is not in fact causal for lactase persistence (LP).
I hadn’t thought anybody questioned that LP and Indo-European languages spread together. Here’s a 2017 article confirming that, Milk and the Indo-Europeans - HAL-Inria.
As for farming, you say:
OK. I said nothing at all about that timeline. The spread of LP took thousands of years to reach northernmost Europe. Even so, it was certainly there by 3000 years ago, says Genome flux and stasis in a five millennium transect of European prehistory.
More recent is more recent than the times given in my first link, though they don’t dispute the other claims in the article. Different studies often contradict one another; time and additional studies are needed. If you have other cites I’d like to see those too.
The amount of lactose is similar in almost every species used for milking. Anything that can be said about goat’s milk can be said about cow’s milk. (And sheep and yak and reindeer and …)
Note how your cite states “We infer” and also note how the only hit for “allele” in that entire paper is from well over a decade ago?
While Yamnaya was a part of the Steppe ancestry I would state that your cite is still claiming Yamnaya *was *PIE. Yamnaya was obviously related to the Indo-European replacement but not enough information to claim that they are PIE.
To quote from your cite.
Kurgan hypothesis or the Pontic Steppe theory as your cite stated is way to broad and generally you will note a de-emphasis over the past few years. But note that their cited study there *Haak *is the one that demonstrated a there was minimal evidence of lactase persistence among the Yamnaya
They are trying to match Allentofwith Haak’s paper that is counter to their claim.
So sorry, I think the linguists bent on your cite is coloring their reading of the evidence, which unfortunately is not as clear cut as they present it.
While there is no doubt that the Yamnaya culture expanded in 5300–4600 BP, lactose tolerance didn’t become common until after their expansion.