Ancient history

To help us think more systematically about the present issues, I want to review how we got here, beginning at what is for these purposes the beginning. Anatomically modern humans -- people whose skeletons are essentially indistinguishable from ours -- appeared around 250,000 years ago, maybe a bit sooner. We can ' t be entirely sure because there could be older fossils we haven ' t found, but probably close enough. Genus Homo culture had changed very slowly before then. Homo erectus had pretty much the same tool kit for 1 million years.  But shortly after the appearance of H. sapiens -- apparently not immediately but somewhere around 80-100,000 years ago or maybe more (this is uncertain and disputed, don ' t sweat the small stuff), human culture began to evolve rapidly, quite abruptly. Our ancestors expanded into new habitats and rapidly developed new technologies and behavioral adaptations to exploit them. Symbolic items appeared, beads and decorated items. (There could have been much more but it hasn ' t survived.) There is evidence of long distance trade networks. People left Africa and began to expand into Europe and Asia, adapting to radically different climates and ecological regimes. Of course we can ' t be sure why and how this happened so dramatically " in the dark backward and abysm of time, " but the likely explanation in the view of most is language. Somehow, in the blink of an eye in geological time, an ape began to speak. And that ' s what makes us wha...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs