When did humans like us originate?

Factual Questions
1

Over what span of time (because all estimates have error) did humanity as we conceive it proliferate?

The answer depends upon your definitions. Match definitions to a range of estimates and we’re in FQ, not IMHO or GD.

The earliest fossil evidence for anatomically early modern humans appears in Africa some 300,000 years ago. Various fossil sites in Africa date from 315,000, 260,000, and 230,000 years ago.

However human language evolved probably at least 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. That’s a lot later. Some less plausible estimates date from 40,000 years ago:

Because all human groups have language, language itself, or at least the capacity for it, is probably at least 150,000 to 200,000 years old. This conclusion is backed up by evidence of abstract and symbolic behaviour in these early modern humans, taking the form of engravings on red-ochre [7, 8]. The archaeological record reveals that about 40,000 years ago there was a flowering of art and other cultural artifacts at modern human sites, leading some archaeologists to suggest that a late genetic change in our lineage gave rise to language at this later time [9]. But this evidence derives mainly from European sites and so struggles to explain how the newly evolved language capacity found its way into the rest of humanity who had dispersed from Africa to other parts of the globe by around 70,000 years ago.

So how do I define, “Humans like us?” I say language is a central element of that. Is literacy? I say no, since most humans who lived over the past 300 years were illiterate. For context, worldwide literacy rates were 56% in 1980. In 2020 they were 87%. As a reference, agriculture developed about 12,000 years ago or 10,000 BCE.

In the past, my go-to WAG has been "100,000 years ago for modern humans, 2 million years ago for Australopithecus (though I see an older skeleton from 3.7 million years ago was found in South Africa in 1997). I’d like a more granular and informed view though.

2

Here’s my interpretation of the OP. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond recounted his belief that the aborigineal New Guineans he encountered were smarter than the typical European:

One day, when my companions of the Fore tribe and I were starving in the jungle because another tribe was blocking our return to our supply base, the Fore man returned to camp with a large rucksack full of mushrooms he had found… But then I had an unsettling thought: what if the mushrooms were poisonous?

I patiently explained to my Fore companions that I had read about some mushrooms’ being poisonout, that I had heard of a even expert American mushroom collectors’ dying because of the difficulty of distinguishing safe from dangerous mushrooms… At that point my companions got angry and told me to shut up and listen while they explained some things to me. After I had been quizzing them for years about names of hundreds of trees and birds, how could I insult them by assuming they didn’t have names for different mushrooms? Only Americans could be so stupid as to confuse poisonous mushrooms with safe ones. They went on to lecture me about the 29 types of edible mushroom species…

Me: any tribe which has terminology, an understanding of their work with detailed naming, is a human like us. Such humans have existed for how long?

3

Older threads:

4

I always thought that humans originated when they started painting images on cave walls. Lots of creatures can communicate between one another, but only humans have ever made a permanent record. The oldest known cave paintings are at least 51,200 years old and were discovered in Indonesia. For me, that’s when the clock starts.

5

Bonus question: at what date is everyone painting on cave walls or doing something similar? I’d like to know about origins (it’s in the thread title) but I’d also like to know something about the typical biped with opposable thumbs walking around at various dates.

6

It sounds like you are answering your own question: it is a vague, wide, blurry area not a sharp line of demarcation, and where you put it depends on your subjective critera on what makes someone “human like us”. It is like asking where the line is between green and blue.

Personally, if I had to choose, I would choose the appearance of anatomically modern skeletons in the fossil record, but that’s problematic because most humans are a hybrid cross with Neanderthals and/or Denisovians.

7

I’m imagining a set of if-then statements. Characteristic A originated somewhere between xx,xxx and yyy,yyyy years ago, and was near-universal across the globe zz,zzz years ago. Characteristic B originated… and was near-universal across the globe…

We can also discuss how much an anatomically modern human being is like us if they don’t speak a language with over 100 words. Hypothetically.

8

Cave drawings and other artifacts seem remarkable today because they survive but they were clearly (to me) the work of accomplished artists. In other words, before there was cave art, there was art and apparently (to me) a lot of it. They must have been full on people as we know them, walking & talking, to transfer those technologies into the darkness of caves.

It really is definitions but I’ve arbitrarily used the 250000 years number for myself with anything 100-300kyo reasonable.

9

My understanding is that modern humans originated between 100k and 200k years ago. However, Steven Pinker makes the argument in one of his books (How the Mind Works? The Language Instinct?) that the last pieces to fall into place for language were around 50k-100k years ago, because after that, you see an explosion of creativity, technology, and so on. So, he (and I) would put fully modern humans to be around 50k-100k years ago.

Humans left Africa around 60k-90k years ago, right? So, it must have been before then.

10

You’ve already given the problem. We have only a few data points for the oldest anything, and therefore cannot say with any surety that these anythings were worldwide.

In addition, geneticists have found multiple bottlenecks in which the Sapiens were reduced to a small number. One recent study (that I can’t find right this moment) put the number of Sapiens at about 1,000 in Europe 50,000 years ago. They were the ones who mated with Neanderthals. Can we be sure that that small a band of immigrants already demonstrated every modern human trait or were they merely lurking ready to be brought out? Do potential but non-manifested traits count for your definition?

The earliest known cave art in Europe is from 64,000 years ago, and so is presumably by Neanderthals. Neanderthals by definition are not humans like us. When did these abilities emerge and did they emerge independently or through cultural transmission? Can we say Sapiens had every “modern” trait that the Neanderthals demonstrated even if no record exists?

Do we indeed known anything about the earliest Sapien brains? It’s possible that those brains always had the potential for everything that manifested later. In that case, everything was “worldwide” long before any records appeared.

11

There’s nothing special about caves - humans probably drew on everything. The only reason we talk about “cave drawings” today is because they’re the only drawings that survived.

“Caveman” is a misnomer. There was never a point in prehistory where more than a handful of people lived in caves. There simply aren’t enough livable caves out there.

12

I think it’s misleading to refer to “anatomically modern” humans, because when people say that, they really just mean the aspects of anatomy that show up in the fossil record. But our brains are part of our anatomy, too, and the brain of a pre-lingual human would have been different from that of a post-lingual human.

Except, of course, that it’s not as simple as “pre-lingual” and “post-lingual”, either. Language developed gradually just like any other trait.

That’s also too simplistic. Neanderthals were certainly different from us, but are they different enough to not warrant being called “like us”? You can’t just say “they were different because they’re a different species”, because that definition goes the other way: If they were a different species (a matter on which consensus has shifted with time), it’s because they were sufficiently different from us.

13

Well, the OP said “humanity as we conceive it,” which I take to be the common cultural view of functionally modern humans rather than the academic hemming and hewing about fine details.

That’s why I asked so many questions about definitions and lines to be drawn. Without those, how do we say anything?

14

One traditional anthropological perspective would be, “There are no humans like us, because there are many ways of being human and many human cultures both within time and across time.” By that definition, a human like you first originated when you were born. Asked and answered.

I don’t accept this, because there are many plausible definitions including, “Of the genus homo” (though I rejected that sort of expansive definition upthread).

This makes my question much more difficult to answer. I’d like to know more about the timing of these various bottlenecks, what portion of humanity they affected, etc.

I think there are a range of definitions that are plausible candidates for, “Humans like us”, some more plausible than others. Each definition will have a corresponding temporal range for both origination and for the time that this characteristic became widespread among genus homo. My working assumption is that we’ll mostly discuss homo sapiens and we’ll assume that other human species are not more sophisticated than them, though they possibly could be equal.

In post 2, my interpretation of the OP involved use of terminology which implies not just language but specialized language. I don’t know how we could determine that and I don’t know what reasonable correlates of that might be. But I would propose that there is both commonality and difference in the underlying cognition of these 2 pieces of art, created in 350,000 - 400,000 BP and c. 41,000 BP. (The first may or may not be art.)

15

Humans who are us are all the peoples of modern Earth, so the first great diaspora, represented by the ancestors of Australian Aboriginal people, arrived in Greater Australia about 70-65,000ish years ago provides an absolute end date. They made sweet hominid love to Denisovans along the way, and so have a slightly different genomic composition to others to boast about, but they are all human. They brought with them art, religion / complex metaphysical thought, elaborate languages that responded to and reflected their world, and full developed material culture.

The hints are that they left Africa with these; they did not get them from rooting Denisovans or found them under a tree somewhere in Anatolia.

The archaeological evidence in Africa is pretty scrappy and ambiguous but you are getting glimpses of all of these starting to emerge in the 200-100,000 year band. It could be earlier, and as more evidence comes in it might push past that date as a package of traits.

16

There was subsequent geneflow and cultural flow after ancestors of Australian Aboriginal people reached Australia c. 70,000 bp. For example, the dingo reached Australia some 4000 years ago, indicating some sort of human contact from Indian Ocean islands. That said, I’m highly sympathetic to Banksiaman’s approach, and Bergstrom (2018) reports very limited geneflow since 50,000 bp.

17

This of course is almost the opposite of a factual question.

What does it mean — like us?

Are illiterate people like us? I have to answer yes, but it is worth considering. Are innumerate people — those who can hardly add or subtract — like us? That may be a tougher one. Is it true that the concept of zero is only about 2,000 - 4,000 years old, or was there some much older concept of nothingness? If people really had no idea at all of zero, maybe they weren’t like us. Of course, I do not mean their lives were less valuable, just that they thought a lot differently.

This kind of thinking suggests that people like us are much more recent than supposed.

The oldest language family, Afroasiatic, is supposed to be, according to my Wikipedia link, between 10,000 and 20,000 years old. Is there any reason to believe that language families older than that could do nearly as good a job of communicating, and of providing a basis for self-reflection, as the languages we now know?

If your language is some sort of weak pidgin, you are, even if genetically like me, not one of me in your thinking. If, before Afroasiatic, languages were significantly less efficient, we are no more than 20,000 years old.

18

And then you have to define “us”, because there are a lot of present-day people who are innumerate.

19

You might want to check out a book my wife is reading and I’m peeking at, When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano, by Donald R. Prothero. He blames the bottleneck around 74,000 years old on the Toba volcano eruption. He talks about other bottlenecks and claims that that all Native Americans descended from about 70 individuals who came from Asia 11,000-13,000 years ago. Needless to say, these claims are extremely controversial and while he’s an expert in biogeology, his focus has not been on humans. The relevant chapters are very short, though.

The number of species in genus Homo is also under hot debate and subject to flux, as new species are discovered and older species merged. You can find mention of over 20 species today. We know almost nothing about the culture of at least half that number. The lineage to Sapiens is a small fraction, three or four at most. Neanderthals are not in Sapiens line of descent. I’m extremely leery of saying that any other species than Sapiens is just like us. They may be. But any certainty is hidden in the fog of “we don’t know.”

20

I can make it into FQ simply with the use of definitions. Assume that illiterate people are not like us. This is not unreasonable on its face, though it conflicts with the Jared Diamond’s impressions recounted in post 2. The first written language was Sumerian c 3100 BC. Early readers tended to read aloud: silent reading only was only first observed in 383 AD: the observer was Saint Augestine; the silent reader was Saint Ambrose, sometimes referred to as the first human by nobody. Up until the 800s, most reading was done aloud until regulations mandated that scribes should read silently: it was then that humanity was first established in larger numbers according to the, “Must read silently” definition.

Only a slim majority of the world’s population was literate in 1980, before then most of the world’s population wasn’t human like us. Records from that era are spotty: it was pre-internet so reports are inherently unreliable.

I’m kidding on the square insofar as this is the approach I’m looking for: define, then report what existing research says about the definition.

I’m pretty sure that I think in a different way than I did 35 years ago: for one thing the internet has absolutely destroyed my attention span. I think it’s reasonable to argue that in some way me-of-35-years-ago is a human like us, though in some ways he was not. At any rate (much) broader definitions are certainly valid and worthy of discussion.

PhillyGuy asks some very worthwhile questions, btw, which I don’t want my humor to detract from.

Knowing names for the 29 local types of edible mushroom (as the Tore tribe in New Guinea did) would have required a certain level of language facility: is there evidence that those of 30,000 bp could not attain such mastery?

Tools provide some clues. Except I can’t interpret them. The oldest wooden spear dates from 410,000 bp, but so what it doesn’t have a tip: it’s just worked wood. The oldest spearhead was once dated to 200,000 bp, but more recently there was a whopping 500,000 year old find. Arg. Oh yeah, and hand axes date from 1.6 and 2.6 million years bp.

So anyway spears have been around for a long time. Arrowheads date only from 75,000 bp in Ethiopia and 65,000 bp in South Africa. Lombard and Phillipson: “Hunting with a bow and arrow requires intricate multi-staged planning, material collection and tool preparation and implies a range of innovative social and communication skills.” Along those lines 48,000 bp arrowheads were found in Sri Lanka and stone points of 54,000 years ago have been found in Europe.

Using round numbers, I’m gravitating towards the 50,000 bp figure for evidence of widespread humanity like us, using bow and arrow criteria.

But for perspective, the earliest pottery shards date from 20,000 bp.

ETA: Thanks rickp. So maybe 50,000 bp for bows and arrows and 2 million bp for genus homo.