RE: Family Matters
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
I've always thought that human evolution wasn't so much a tree as a shrubby, scrubby tangled bush 😁
These graphics are a great way to visualise it !
0
0
0.000
Thank you!
Human evolution is weird and messy. There were even hobbit-like creatures at some point. One thing I realized after making the human chart is that you can see the changes in facial features as time moves forward. I believe the AI is using the actual likeness of each species, which would be absolutely incredible.
It's weird to think that until very recently indeed the Earth was inhabited by several human species at once. Perhaps still is, if the Yeti and Bigfoot are the last remnants of the australopithecines.
Certainly having other human species around would be within the timescale that stories and oral history could cover; the last archaeological evidence of Neanderthals crosses with the Aurignacean Culture, and I've always wondered if the little dark people of Irish myth were an earlier human species. I reckon The people of Flores are still convinced that Homo Floresiensis is lurking out there in the jungles of their island.
This is a fascinating part of human history. It makes me wonder what would've happened if other species had not gone extinct. I imagine that conflicts were inevitable between humans and the other groups that existed at that time. It's not surprising, given that we hardly get along with each other let alone a totally different species. Yet there was also interbreeding between humans and those groups, as DNA analysis shows. This raises more questions about their influence on modern people. Our evolutionary development is a really convoluted story with a few loose threads like the Sasquatch. It does make me wonder if they were the last of their kind.
I have a sneaking feeling that the reason humans don't get along with each other is simple; over-crowding. There are always going to be individual squabbles, but until the Neolithic agricultural revolution, there were few enough humans that if two groups looked like coming into conflict, they'd just move away from each other. Much as the few remaining hunter-gatherer populations do today.
In terms of inter-breeding, well humans are one of the few species that are permanently in heat (leading to the aforementioned over-crowding). DNA evidence suggests it's almost certain that both Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
I've seen a convincing theory that many of the traits on the autistic spectrum we see today are actually inherited through Neanderthal DNA. They preferred close family groups rather than the extended family tribes of modern humans, and faced some tough environmental challenges. So being able to hyper-focus on a task, and the ability to store huge amounts of detail on specific subjects would be advantageous survival traits, while there was no need to be able to read social cues from anyone outside the immediate family.
There is an interesting case of a large group of chimps in Uganda who have a very human-like social structure. Once their group reached a certain size, they formed two factions that became hostile to each other and permanently split. It's a curious case because of their similarity in social structure to humans.
https://www.livescience.com/animals/primates/chimpanzees-in-uganda-are-locked-in-a-deadly-civil-war-after-their-group-split-apart-and-scientists-dont-know-why