8: The Era of Modern Humans Begins

 

Imagine you had a time machine and you set the controls to the year 70,000 BP (this many years ago) and the location to 30 degrees north by 30 degrees east.  This would take you into one of the richest and most fertile lands on Earth, a valley just a few miles south of the Nile delta called ‘Faiyum.’  Today, this land produces rice, a fantastic amount.  It produces more rice per acre than any other place on Earth.  The conditions are perfect, with endless sun, endless water, fertile land washed downriver from the tropics over the course of millions of years.  The modern rice is the same type as the wild rice that grew there 70,000 years ago.  It is rich and wonderful land. 

What would you expect to see?

Perhaps, if you had gone back a lot further, say to 1 million years ago, you might find some migratory people living in the area.  They may be living a lot like the migratory ‘Indians’ that Lewis and Clark encountered on their travels to the western part of North American in 1803,basically hunting and gathering for their meals.  They may look at you curiously and probably wouldn’t have anything to say.  Perhaps they may use the standard gesture for ‘are you hungry?’ putting fingers together and raising their hand to their mouth with a questioning look in their eyes.  If you smile back and have an affirmative look in your eyes, they may motion for you to follow them to their camp.  They would have some fish turning on a spit over a fire and some rice being steamed, together with roots and berries, in a hollowed out rock.  They would grab up a palm leave and scoop some rice and fish onto it, and hand it to you.  If they see confusion on your face, they may take a few fingers full and put it into their mouths, and gesture for you to do the same. 

They have no reason to do anything else.  They see strangers from time to time.  They are different and may know things they don’t know.  You may know about foods that they don’t know about.  You may know about medicines they don’t know about.  You aren’t a threat to them.  they don’t think you are going to ‘take their land’ because they don’t have any conception of human ownership of land.  They treat you well until they have reason to do otherwise.

That is what you might see if you went back a million years.  But for this example, you aren’t going back a million years, you are going back 70,000 years.  By this time, richer lands have all been taken over by people with territorial sovereignty societies.  Their land belongs to them.  Their food belongs to them.  They are suspicious of strangers.  There is a good chance they will kill you on sight, without even bothering to find out if you may have something to offer them.  (The conquering Spanish killed and killed and killed, without even bothering to find out of the ‘Indians’ they were killing may have something to offer them.)  

But there is a chance that you may happen on someone who treats you differently.  There are people who are compassionate and curious, even in societies where people are raised to be fearful of everything outside their experience.  You may know a few people like this.  You may even be one.  Lets say you the first person you meet does not attack you, but looks at you curiously.  She forces a smile (you can see the fear in her face, but she is trying.)  You try to match her smile.  She holds out her hand, palm forward, in the universal gesture that says ‘I am not holding a weapon.  I mean you no harm.’   She has a questioning look in her eyes.  She is asking you something:  Do you intend to do harm to her?   You should realize there is an appropriate response.  You need to show her that you don’t have any weapons in your hands.  You point the palms at her and, to be sure she understands, turn over the hands so she can see there is nothing inside.  Gradually, her fear leaves her.  Eventually, she makes the gesture:  ‘Are you hungry?’  You let her know you are.  (You don’t need words for this.)  She takes you back to her home.  She encounters a lot of others on the way.  They all know her.  She takes your hand, a sign that you are with her and under her protection.  The people she meets make confused faces but she pulls up your joined hands and puts them where they can see them.  You are with her.  If they value their relationship with her, they will not harm you. 

Imagine she takes you to her family home and gives you something to eat.  She makes it clear, without speaking, that you are her guest.  Her family is to treat you as such.  All this can be done without words. You don’t have to say anything and she doesn’t even have to be capable of speech.  We can make a lot of things known without speech. 

You could go to the same place today.  You could fly into Cairo Airport and take a taxi or Uber (41 minutes, according to Google) to the center of the Faiyum valley.   You could stay at the Lake House by Tunisia Green Resort  (about $55) and take a cab into the busy area where the common Egyptians live.  If you took some lessons in Nobiin before you left (Nobiin is the language that common people have spoken in that part of Egypt for many centuries), you may strike up come conversations with the locals.  You may ask for recommendations for restaurants, for example, ask about things that are for sale, or, if are very brave, talk about politics.  Most of the people you would meet are very poor and aren’t literate, so you wouldn’t expect to talk about things that are too complicated.  But even uneducated people can have great insight about many things.  If you found an area of interest, you might expect some interesting discussions.

Now I want to ask you to imagine what kind of contrast you would expect to find between the people who lived in this valley 70,000 years ago, and the people who live there today.  How do they differ? 

 

Complex Language Skills and Quarterly Extinctions

 

There were some important changes in the condition of the planet Earth that occurred starting about 70,000 years ago that may give insight about this.  The first to notice these changes and write about them was Charles Darwin, who discussed the in his 1830 book ‘The Voyages of the Beagle.’   He was studying fossil records and found a dramatic change in the number of animals that existed before and after a certain date.  There were a lot of animals that existed before that date that did not exist after that date.  In other words, there was a mass extinction event.  This mass extinction events has come to be called the ‘quaternary extinction events.’   It was such a dramatic change, that biologists consider it to be a dividing line between two eras, the Pleistocene and Holocene. 

Further research showed that the extinction events didn’t take place at the same time everywhere.  They moved in a kind of wave.  They started in north Africa about 70,000 BP (this many years ago).  They then spread up to the north and west, through Europe and up to the north and east through Asia.  They the extinction events traveled at a rather leisurely rate and reached the far east of Asia about 55,000 BP.  The wave arrived in Indonesia about 50,000 BP and arrived in Australia about 47,000 BP. 

Then, the wave of extinctions took a long pause. 

It began again in America about 15,000 BP.  It spread slowly, as it had spread through Asia and finally reached the tip of South America about 13,000 BP. 

Darwin’s evidence has been scrutinized in great detail by people looking for possible errors.  They haven’t been able to find any.  His findings have been verified over and over again.  These events happened.  Something caused a wave of mass extinctions of certain kinds of animals that started in Africa and then traveled around the world over the course of 58,000 years. 

What was this ‘something?’ 

Darwin’s book came out in 1831, nearly 200 years ago.  People have been trying to figure out what caused the quaternary extinction events for nearly 200 years. 

For most of this period, they worked very hard to come up with explanations that would allow them to claim that these events were not caused by humans.  There is a reason this was their primary focus.  Their field was built on assumptions that had been mandated by religious doctrines that held that humans have only existed for 6,000 years.  If humans didn’t exist before 6,000 years ago, they obviously couldn’t have caused events that took place 70,000 years ago.  There had to be some other explanation. 

Researchers tried hard to find something that made sense. 

They came up with a lot of theories.  The two that survive to this day involve possible collisions with comets or other bodies from space, and changes in weather.  Some of the theories pointed to impact by extra terrestrial objects that just happened to go in a wave over the areas where the extinctions took place.  Some claimed there was a climate change wave that started in Africa and traveled up to the Mediterranean Sea where it split, part going north and west into Europe and the other part going east through Asia;   then there was a pause and the climate changed in Indonesia and Australia.  Then there was another pause and this climate change event started again in North America 15,000 years ago, then traveled down to South America, arriving there 13,000 years ago.  Then the weather went back  to normal worldwide.   (You will find a lot of people on the internet who still don’t want to believe there were humans on Earth 70,000, and go to great lengths to try to make the ‘wave of climate change events’ seem plausible.  Many of the people who are behind these papers have letters after their names and good reputations in their fields.)  

When I first learned about these events, I was in graduate school.  The year was 1980.   At that time, the prevailing view was that the events couldn’t have been caused by humans because humans had not arrived in any of the areas where the events took place by the time they took place.  Radiological dating techniques were primitive and tests were very expensive, so not any artifacts had been tested.  Dates were estimates based on non-scientific analysis.  Times have changed a lot.  As the tests got better and cheaper, more artifacts were tested and the ‘date of first arrival of humans’ in the different areas was pushed back and back.  Now, a lot of evidence has been found that people lived in these areas when the events started.  In Australia and the Americas, the extinction events coincide with the arrival of humans in the various areas exactly.  A lot of people still try to find ways to make it seem that these events were not caused by humans.  But their arguments get thinner and harder to accept every year.  The prevailing view seems to be shifting as I write this in 2024.   More than half of the articles I found on the internet about the cause claim the events were caused by humans.  

 

What This Helps us Understand

 

The homo sapiens species (our species) already lived in Africa, Europe, and Asia, when the extinctions began.  But these homo sapiens were not the same subspecies as modern humans.  They were homo sapiens neanderthalis in the west (Europe) and homo sapiens denisova in the east (Asia).  We know that the homo sapiens neanderthalis and homo sapiens denisovan are the same species as modern humans.  If we were in the same place at the same time, we could breed with them and produce babies that were healthy and capable of reproducing themselves. 

But we don’t know much about the capabilities of these early subspecies of homo sapiens.  Most likely, if you really could go back 70,000 years BP to Faiyum, and spend time with the people there, you would not find them to have the same level of intellect as the people you would meet if you flew there and stayed in the Lake House and walked through the same areas today.  Back 70,000 years ago, you would probably be able to communicate with them on basic matters, like a need for food or a desire for sex.  But you probably wouldn’t be able to hold complex conversations with them.  You wouldn’t be able to plan an extremely complex event or activity, say one that required hundreds of people to cooperate and play different roles to work. 

Modern humans have fantastic capabilities to communicate complex ideas through spoken words.  There was obviously a time when our ancestors didn’t have this ability.  (The pans clearly did not have it.)  There must have been a time when this ability developed.  If you could go back to just before this ability existed, then compared the realities to just after it was common, you would expect to see a dramatic difference in the way people lived.  The ability to express complex and abstract thoughts through speech gives us fantastic capabilities that no other animals have.  We would expect to see some evidence of this change in basic realities of life for the people that occurred in the places and at the times when people gained this incredible capability. 

If we accept that the brain components that make it possible for us to express complex thoughts with speech developed in Africa about 70,000 years ago, and these components provided such great advantages to the people with them that those without them simply couldn’t compete, and there was a ‘wave’ of ‘increasing mental capability’ that started in Africa and spread around the world over the course of 57,000 years, then the wave of extinction events makes total sense. 

 

Speech And The Ability To Control The Environment On A Large Scale

 

Most likely, people wanted to get rid of certain animals all along.  Saber tooth tigers went extinct during these extinction events.  These tigers were fierce and powerful predators.  Humans have no real defenses against these cats.  We can’t outrun them.  We can’t outfight them.  Our skins are very thin and they can cut through them without trying.  At night, when we are most helpless, we can’t even see them.  They can follow every move we make.  We are little more than walking snacks to them.  They can grab us whenever they are hungry. 

We could kill them however.   We are very smart.  But a single person, no matter how smart, could not hope to successfully kill large numbers of tigers alone.  To hunt them, large numbers of people would have to work together in a very organized way.  Each of the people in the team would have a specific task.  It would have to be worked out in advance, together with contingencies and ways to get help from others if they couldn’t do their task themselves, or if they find themselves in danger.  This kind of activity would require a lot of communication. 

And killing one tiger, or even a hundred, won’t make any difference.  The only way to be safe from tigers would be to wipe them all out.  This means that the project would have to be carried out with cooperation of large numbers of other groups over vast differences.  This kind of activity could not take place without a very advanced capability to communicate with others. 

We know this:  Saber tooth tigers once existed in vast numbers in areas where humans lived.  Now, they are no more.  They ‘went extinct’ in the extinction events along with a great many other very dangerous predators.  This happened somehow.  Tigers eat a lot of different animals.  A lot of animals would have wanted them gone.  But only one had the ability to make this happen:  humans.  Stupid humans could not have made this happen.  The people who made this happen had to intelligent and articulate.  They had to be able to express complex abstract ideas, to understand complex plans, and to contribute to these plans over time, over a course of many generations, to accomplish something that all humans would have wanted.  (No one wants to watch human children being eaten by tigers.)  

Predators weren’t the only animals that went extinct in these events.  A great many other animals that are not predators went extinct too. 

These other animals all had something in common:  they ate foods that humans could eat and wanted to eat.  They competed with us for food.  Anything they ate, we could not eat.  Some of these animals were enormous and ate fantastic amounts of food.  A few mastodons could break into any granary that early humans made and eat an entire year’s food for a tribe in a single day.  There is nothing the people could do to prevent this without coordinated effort.  You aren’t going to scare a mastodon away as you would scare away a deer.  He outweighs you 10 times over and has tusks that can impale you, by a twist of his head.  Humans can hunt and kill mastodons.  But this requires coordination by a lot of people in a very complex project. 

Most likely, humans would have wanted to get rid of these animals all along.  But before about 70,000 years ago, they couldn’t do this.  (If they could have done it, they would have and the animals would have gone extinct earlier.)  Then, something changed.  Their capabilities increased enough to allow them to get it done. 

They gained the ability to wipe out predators and competitors in one area, in Africa.  The people with this ability then spread to Europe and Asia.  Most likely, this happened by the process Darwin called ‘sexual selection.’  People decide who they want as sex partners.  We hear people talking about this issue today:  ‘I want someone I can talk to.’  Those who can understand us and make us feel that they are on the same page are more desirable than the oafs and walking bags of hormones who can do the deed, but are strangers to us after it is over.  However it happened, it did.  The ability to express complex ideas spread. 

 

Speech

 

Modern humans have three tiny brain components that the people who lived before 70,000 years ago may not have had.  These brain components allow us to turn our thoughts into mental words, then turn these mental words into sounds (by speaking), then allow us to recognize sounds that are intended to be interpreted as thoughts when we hear them (including when we hear ourselves speaking), then to translate these sounds into thoughts that we can process as if we had generated these thoughts ourselves.  These brain components transfer the things we are thinking into the minds of others, through the medium of speech.  

Scientists have been able to identify these components using MRI scanners that trace electrical signals through the brain.  They have people think about something while in a scanner.  They see the pattern developing: that is the electrical signature of the ‘thought.’  They can then ask the person to consider saying what is on her mind, then to actually say it.  they can follow the electrical activity and find out where these mental activities are taking place. 

The thoughts that will eventually become the things we call ‘words,’ originate in a place called Broca’s area.  The signals are then transferred through Arcuate fasciculus to become the signals that cause our vocal chords to vibrate to create the sounds that we associate with these words.  When we sounds that our minds think may be words, the signals from the sounds are transferred to a part of the brain called Wernicke’s area.  They are then processed and sent back through the Arcuate fasciculus into Broca’s area, which tests them to determine if they are words.  If they are words, they are then processed back into thoughts in that area.  When we speak aloud, we hear our words and this gives us feedback that tells us the thoughts are being properly expressed, at least in a way that allows us to understand them. 

Genetic analysis is still in it infancy.  Almost certainly, there are DNA patterns that somehow get translated into the cell division signals that take place as babies develop to cause their brains to develop these components.  We can expect these genes to be found, eventually.  At this point, we will be able to compare DNA profiles of modern humans to neanderthals and denisovans to see if they had these genes.  If we find they didn’t, when we do, this is going to help us understand how we differ from neanderthal and denisovans.  We don’t have this information yet, but we do know this:  We have mental capabilities  that our evolutionary ancestors did not have.  These include our higher speech functions.  These capabilities allow us to do things that our ancestors could not do, including wipe out animals that feed on us and take food that, if not taken, would be available for us to eat. 

If you want to understand a complex concept, it makes sense to try get a big pictures of the concept first, before you delve into the details.  If you want to understand a car, you should look at a car first, and watch one work.  Then you can see how the parts fit together to make a working car.  It is very hard to understand if you only deal with details and don’t know how it fits together.  Cars have tiny devices called ‘piston rings’ that perform very complex functions.  You could study these functions for years before fully understanding every different thing different piston rings do.  But knowing this won’t help you understand how the car works, if you have never seen a car.  It is useless information unless you can fit it into a big picture that makes sense.

Here, I want you to understand how the conditions of existence for humans came to be as they are today.  We need to know this because we have a lot of very serious problems to solve.  If we don’t know how we got where we are, we have no hope in solving these problems. 

The development of the brain components responsible for complex speech marks an enormous event in human history, possibly on a par with the ability to use fire.  These are the key events in our past, the ones that we have to understand if we are to understand where we are and where we can go from here.  We may not have exact information about all of the details, but we do have enough information to formulate theories that fit all of the information we have and have a very high likelihood of being eventually proven to be correct.  We don’t have to wait for this proof to use the theories to help us understand the big picture.

If we accept that the brain components responsible for complex speech developed about 70,000 years ago, we can make a lot of sense out of things that otherwise are pretty hard to see clearly or understand.  I think it makes sense to accept this as a working theory:  the difference between modern humans and the lower subspecies (homo sapiens neanderthalis and homo sapiens denisovan) is the ability to turn complex thoughts into the things we call ‘words,’ to communicate these ‘words’ to others through speech, to recognize sounds that are intended to be communication of ‘words’ when we hear them, and to translate these words back into thoughts in our minds.  

We can do these things.  We know this.  This is not a theory, it is a fact.  The theory is that the lower subspecies did not have these brain components or the abilities they bring.  The theory is that this is the most important difference between modern humans, the subspecies homo sapiens sapiens, and the suibspecies that existed before 70,000 BP.