Human Beginnings

For a Christmas present I received a book.  Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari.  I am several chapters into it by now, and I find it fascinating.  The author is explaining how the several species in the genus Homo (meaning man), including Sapiens (southern and eastern Africa), Neanderthals (northern Europe and Asia), and Denisovians (in the far eastern Asia) all co-existed at one point, but were widely separated by terrain.  Then, about 70,000 years ago H. sapiens moved north, and eventually east, and the Neanderthals and Denisovians "disappeared".  

He speculates that the key element of difference was the development of a better and more articulate language that included concepts that made it possible for the H. sapiens species to overwhelm and defeat the others.  This language was accompanied by an awareness the others did not have which included abstract concepts like gods and religion, among others.  Earliest artifacts from that time are carved pieces that could be interpreted as icons depicting hypothetical deities, half lion, half man, that sort of thing.  This abstract thinking lead, in the author's opinion, to other ideas that could organize what had been a purely hunter/gatherer society into towns and cities, organizations of people and materials that family-based agrarian societies could not muster.  In the clash of species that followed the advancement of H. sapiens, the larger and more cold-adapted Neanderthals never stood a chance of protecting their territories.

He also suggests that DNA evidence shows that Neanderthals and H. sapiens were only marginally compatible, much like horses and donkeys.  Horses and donkeys can produce an offspring, a mule, but mules are sterile.  The rarity of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans, he says, is evidence of this same sort of incompatibility, and the reason for calling each group a separate species.

  The author spends a lot of time talking about the timeline of human development, and how this 70,000 year old inter-species interaction was, geologically and biologically speaking, like it happened almost yesterday.  These peoples had language, social structures, a sense of themselves, and so on, so that if you met one today they might go unnoticed.  He points out that one group migrated through modern Indonesia and into Australia about 45,000 years ago, and were essentially isolated since then.  You want to see what humanity looked like 45,000 years ago, watch the movie Crocodile Dundee!  Darwinian evolution certainly was taking place all this time, but the forces of change were not very severe.

I raise this with my BQ regulars mostly as a heads-up that I am reading this book, and that topics from it might show up in future BQ blogs.  Let me know if you decide to read the book, and if enough people do, let's set a time to talk about it together.  Obviously I am interested in the topic.