One of the most exciting things of the last 25-years is the huge increase in knowledge about early humans. This often seems absent from not only debates on migration, but also textbooks and popular cultural narratives. There’s lots we know now, that we didn’t (widely) know when I was 20:
- Our main new information source is genetics – genetics of people, animals, and fauna. Genetics plus more diverse and professional archaeological sites.
- From South Americans to native Australians, that branch of humanity left Africa ~ 48,000 years ago.
- Prior to ~50,000 years ago, finds in Europe and Asia relate to our ancestors.
- Many genetic differences in modern and ancient human populations relate to non-visible disease-resistance and general health adaptations.
- Neanderthals possibly had fire 400,000 years ago.
- Agriculture developed before light skin. Within the last 10,000 years.
- Cities likely developed prior to agriculture. Agriculture might be what happened when we stay still.
- Indigenous hunter-gatherer groups in Northern Europe had dark skin – even as recent as 5,000 BC.
- Farmers brought agriculture into Europe – it was the people not the ideas that migrated.
- Most European farmers were Turkish or steppe farmers that migrated across.
- Central European farmers were maybe restricted from migrating north until lighter skin evolved to handle the vitamin-D problem with agricultural diets. The Celts were central European. Agriculture, migration, culture, and lighter skin are possibly entangled in neolithic northern European history.
- Paleo diets would not be how they are shown online – small bony animals & mashed nuts.
- Agricultural diets provided carbohydrates but lacked micro-nutrients. Teeth of hunter gatherers are good, of farmers poor because of the sugar content from staples.
- Pigs are likely non-kosher because they were domesticated later, via a different geographic & cultural root.
- Agriculture was developed independently in the middle east and central Americas at around the same time. Domestication and agriculture developed around the same time.
- Agriculture and domestication and migration happened slowly over thousands of years. Children farming empty plots next door. Better seeds and animals being selected.
- The Sahara was green with lakes and savanna around 14,000 years ago.
Source podcast: https://onhumans.substack.com/p/the-rest-is-history-from-farming
Robotic Ape 