Chapter Content
Okay, so like, chapter, whatever, forty-two, right? It's all about these like, early humans and stuff. So, it starts with this Dutch doctor, um, Marius something-or-other Dubois, and he goes to Sumatra, right before Christmas, like, back in the day, to, like, actually *look* for early human bones. Which, like, nobody had ever done before, you know? Everyone else just kinda stumbled on them.
And he's, like, not even a paleontologist, just an anatomist. So, you wouldn't really expect him to find anything, and like, why Sumatra anyway? I mean, it's a pretty small island-y place, not really where you'd expect the earliest humans to hang out. But he had this, like, hunch, and, well, there were jobs there, and the caves were, like, where they'd found most of the human-ish fossils so far. And wouldn't you know it? He actually *found* stuff. Like, crazy!
So, before Dubois goes on his adventure, there were like, practically no human fossils found yet. A few Neanderthal bits and pieces, a jawbone, and some cavemen bones from France. Seriously, that's it. The Neanderthal stuff was kinda just sitting on a shelf in London, unloved. I mean, it took, like, fifty years for anyone to even properly describe it! And even then, the guy was only *barely* qualified in anatomy.
And get this, the Neanderthal bones were found by accident in a quarry. The workers gave them to a teacher because he liked, you know, nature stuff. And the teacher, to his credit, was like, "Hey, this might be something new!" But, uh, people argued about it for ages.
Some professor thought they were just the remains of a Mongolian soldier who, like, crawled into a cave to die after being injured, and, you know, buried himself in dirt. One anthropologist even thought the Neanderthal’s brow ridge was because of a broken arm. You know, just crazy explanations. And, like, people were so eager to dismiss early human stuff they'd just believe anything! I mean, someone found a skeleton in France and said it was an Eskimo fossil, but like, what would an ancient Eskimo be doing in France? It was just a Cro-Magnon, you know?
So, that's the background when Dubois, yeah, he starts digging. He gets like, fifty prisoners to do the work for him. They start in Sumatra and then move to Java. And in 1891, they find this skullcap, the Trinil skullcap, yeah? It didn't look fully human, but the brain was way bigger than any ape. Dubois calls it *Pithecanthropus erectus*, which means, like, upright ape-man, right? He says it's the missing link. Everyone starts calling it Java Man. Nowadays we call him *Homo erectus*.
Then, like, the next year, they find this totally modern-looking thigh bone. People thought it was a modern human, nothing to do with Java Man. And Dubois figured out - and he was right about this - that apes walked upright. Just from a tiny skull and a tooth, he made a whole skull model, and it turned out to be, like, super accurate.
But when Dubois gets back to Europe, nobody's impressed. Most scientists didn't agree with him, and they thought he was arrogant. They said the skullcap was just an ape, probably a gibbon. So he gets this anatomist to make a model to support his view, and it gets way more attention than anything Dubois ever wrote. The anatomist goes on tour, gets all the credit, and Dubois is totally ticked off. He gets a boring job as a geology professor and, like, hides his fossils away for twenty years, and then he dies kinda sad.
Meanwhile, halfway across the world, in South Africa, this Aussie guy, Raymond Dart, gets this complete skull of a kid, with a face, jaw, and even a brain cast. It was found in a quarry, and Dart realized it wasn’t *Homo erectus* but something more ape-like. He thinks it's like, two million years old and calls it *Australopithecus africanus*, or "southern ape of Africa." He says it's surprisingly similar to humans.
And Dart gets even *more* flack than Dubois. Like, everyone hated his theory, and seemed like him too. They thought he was arrogant, he named the fossil badly, and his ideas went against what everyone believed. People thought humans split from apes, like, fifteen million years ago in Asia, not Africa! If humans came from Africa, we'd be related to… well, you know. It was like finding a human ancestor in Missouri, just totally out of the blue.
Dart's only supporter was this quirky Scottish guy, Robert Broom, who was a physicist and paleontologist, you know, kinda eccentric, would go naked on field trips, and would, you know, "study" dead patients in his garden. Broom agreed that the skull was important and defended Dart, but it didn't work. For the next fifty years, the Taung child, was just considered an ape, and his finding gets practically ignored.
In 1924, when Dart made his announcement, we only knew about like, four early humans: Heidelberg Man, Rhodesian Man, Neanderthals, and Dubois's Java Man. But that was about to change.
First, in China, this Canadian amateur archaeologist, Davidson Black, starts digging at Dragon Bone Hill. People knew about fossils there, but they were grinding them up for medicine. So, a lot of precious, irreplaceable fossils had already been destroyed.
Black found a tooth. From this, he determined that he had found a new kind of fossil human: *Sinanthropus pekinensis*. That is, Peking Man.
At Black’s urging, there were determined excavations and many other fossils were found. Unforunately, these were all lost December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. A US marine detachment was trying to get them out of the country when they were stopped by Japanese soldiers. The Japanese checked their boxes and, finding only bones, tossed them by the roadside. They were never seen again.
Around the same time, in Java, where Dubois found Java Man, Ralph von Koenigswald discovered another group of early human fossils. They were named the Solo men, after the river they were found on. But his discovery got messed up because he promised the local diggers ten cents for every human fossil they found. Turns out, they were smashing the big fossils into little pieces to get more money.
So, over the next few years, more and more fossils get found, and there's a bunch of new names: Orignacian Man, *Australopithecus transvaalensis*, *Paranthropus robustus*, *Zinjanthropus boisei*, and a bunch of other things. Each nearly always formed the basis for a new genus, or species, or both. By the 1950s, over a hundred hominid names had been coined. Many of the names were subsequently given a series of others as paleontologists refined, revised, and argued.
In 1960, a guy named Clark Howell tried to, like, clean up the mess and reduced everything to two main groups: *Australopithecus* and *Homo*. He decided that Java Man and Peking Man were both *Homo erectus*. It was popular for a while, but it didn't last.
Then, in the 1960s, there was, like, this explosion of new discoveries, and it's never really stopped since. *Homo habilis*, the "handy man," gets discovered, and some people think it's the missing link, but others think it's not even a separate species. Then there's *Homo ergaster*, *Homo rudolfensis*, *Homo antecessor*, and a bunch more species of *Australopithecus*, and on and on. There's, like, twenty documented hominid species, but nobody agrees on which twenty.
Some experts still use Howell’s two main hominid groups of 1960, others put some *Australopithecus* species in a separate group, *Paranthropus*, and some have even added an earlier genus, *Ardipithecus*. And others just straight up don't agree that something is even a separate species.
But the big problem is, like, we don't have enough evidence. It's kinda crazy. There have been billions of humans and human-like things living since we started, but we only have like, five thousand fossils, and they're mostly, like, bits and pieces. One guy said, "If you wanted to, you could fit all the hominid fossils we've ever found into the back of a small truck."
And it's not even like the fossils are spread out nicely. They're all scattered around, and like, a lot of the time, they don't match up. *Homo erectus* was around for over a million years, from Europe to China, but if you brought all the *Homo erectus* fossils back to life, you still wouldn't fill up a school bus. *Homo habilis* is even worse.
One guy put it this way: "You've got a hominid skull in Georgia that's, like, 1.7 million years old. Then you've got a fossil in Spain that's almost a million years younger, and then a Heidelberg Man fossil in Germany that's 300,000 years younger than that. And they're all, like, totally different!" So, you're trying to figure out the whole human story from these little bits and pieces. It's really tough.
So every new fossil seems totally different from everything else. And when you get near the lines between species, it gets really difficult to tell them apart. For example, it's hard to tell, from a single bone, whether it’s a female *Australopithecus boisei* or a male *Homo habilis*.
Paleontologists have to make assumptions based on what else they find around the fossils. And, get this, if you go by the tools found near the fossils, you'd have to think that, like, most early tools were made by antelopes.
Maybe the weirdest thing is the fossils for *Homo habilis*. All by themselves, those fossils don't mean anything. But, if you put them all together, you'll see males and females are evolving in different directions. Some experts don't even think *Homo habilis* should be considered a species. They think it's just, like, a trash can where you can throw any old mismatched fossils. And even those who think it’s its own species can’t agree if it's a cousin or ancestor.
And, to top it all off, paleontologists, yeah, they're kinda biased. They always try to make their discoveries seem important. As one guy said, "It’s fascinating that the discoverer almost always concludes that new evidence supports what he thought all along."
So, there's always gonna be arguments. And paleontologists, well, they *love* to argue. They're like, "Maybe the most conceited people of all scientists."
So, just remember that almost everything about prehistoric humans is, like, up for debate. But here's what we're pretty sure about:
We share like, 99.99999% of our history with African chimps. Then, about seven million years ago, something happened. A new group of animals came out of the forests and started walking on the plains.
That's where you get the *Australopithecines*. For the next five million years, they were the dominant hominids. They split into a bunch of different types.
The most famous *Australopithecine* is Lucy, who was found in Ethiopia in 1974. She's about 3.2 million years old. And everyone says she was, like, the missing link.
Lucy was short, about three feet tall, and she could walk, maybe. She was definitely good at climbing. But that's about it. Her skull was mostly missing, so it’s hard to say what her brain was like. A lot of books say she was about 40% complete, but some say it's closer to a third, and even that might be stretching it.
Also, they're not even sure Lucy was a woman. They just guess because she was small.
Two years after Lucy, Mary Leakey found these footprints in Tanzania that were thought to be from the same family. The footprints were made by two *Australopithecines* walking through volcanic ash that later hardened.
There's this cool exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History that recreates this scene. It shows a man and woman walking side by side, hairy and short, kind of like chimps. It’s heartwarming, but, it’s mostly imagination. Almost everything about the figures - hair, faces, everything, it's made up. They don't even know if they're a couple, and they're not sure what they even were for sure.
But they do know that they were walking close together, maybe even touching.
People thought that we came from Lucy and those footprint walkers, but now, a lot of experts aren’t so sure. The upper part of our femur is more like an ape than the *Australopithecus*. So, maybe Lucy isn't our ancestor. One guy even thinks she couldn't walk upright that well.
In the early 2000s, there were four weird new fossils, including Kenyanthropus platyops. It lived at the same time as Lucy. In 2001 they also found *Ardipithecus ramidus* ancestors dating back to 5.8 million years and *Orrorin tugenensis* dating back to possibly 6 million years. In 2002 a team in Chad discovered a 7 million year old hominid, *Sahelanthropus tchadensis*. They’re all really old, and they could all walk upright.
Walking upright came at a price. Because it needed a change to the pelvis, it made childbearing harder. It meant that mothers were more likely to die in childbirth, and the heads of babies had to be smaller in order to get through narrow birth canals, making them more dependent on their parents.
So why did Lucy and her friends leave the forest? They probably didn't have a choice. The land bridge in Panama blocked the ocean currents and changed the climate. It got drier in Africa. As one guy wrote, "It was not so much that Lucy and her kind left the forests, as that the forests left them."
But on the plains, the early hominids were more exposed. They could see further, but they could also be seen better. And we're still kinda helpless in the wild. Most big animals are stronger, faster, and have sharper teeth than us. We only have our brains and our hands. We're the only animals that can kill from a distance.
You’d think we’d have big brains, but for three million years, Lucy and her *Australopithecine* friends didn't change much. They didn't use tools or get any smarter. What's stranger is that other early hominids used tools, but the *Australopithecines* didn't.
Around two to three million years ago, there were maybe six hominid groups living in Africa. Only one of them lasted - *Homo*. No one knows exactly how the *Australopithecines* and *Homo* are related. About one million years ago, the *Australopithecines* all disappeared, maybe, just maybe we ate them.
It’s thought that *Homo* starts with *Homo habilis*, an animal which we barely know anything about, before finally evolving into us, *Homo sapiens*, or "thinking man." In between, depending on what you read, there were like, six other species: *Homo ergaster*, Neanderthals, *Homo rudolfensis*, *Homo heidelbergensis*, *Homo erectus*, and *Homo antecessor*.
*Homo habilis*, or “handy man” was named so in 1964. He was a pretty primitive animal, looking more like an ape than a human, but the brain was a lot bigger. People thought that big brains and upright walking had to do with each other—that humans leaving the forests had to make more complex plans, which made their brains evolve. It was a bit surprising to realize that so many two-legged hominids were pretty dim.
There’s just no solid evidence for why our brains started to get big. Big brains take a lot of energy to run. They use like, 2% of our body mass but 20% of our energy. Big brains get hungry, and they'd rather be starving to death and eat glucose, you know?
One expert thinks brain size increase was just something random. If you replayed life over and over, even just starting from the time of the hominids, it’s not likely that humans, or anything like them, would make it to today.
“One of the hardest things for people to accept," one expert said, "is that we are not the pinnacle of anything. We are here, and it was not inevitable. Part of human hubris is to see evolution as a process that was actually arranged to produce humans."
Turns out a lot of these early populations made side trips that led nowhere.
One line of tool-using hominids seemed to pop up at random, living at the same time as the mysterious and contested *Homo habilis*. That was *Homo erectus*, Dubois’ Java Man from 1891. He lived for like, 1.8 million years, down to like, 200,000 years ago.
*Homo erectus* was the first species to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to make complex tools, and the first to leave evidence of campsites. Compared to everyone before, the *Homo erectus* looked more human. They were tall, lean, and really strong, more than modern humans.
The world authority on the topic, Allen Walker of Penn State, said that *Homo erectus* was the “Velociraptor of their time.” If you saw him, he’d look human, but, “You wouldn’t want to be around him. You’d be prey.” According to Walker, it was like an adult’s body with a child’s brain.
And although *Homo erectus* has been around for almost a century, we still only know a bit about him from scraps and pieces. It wasn’t until the 1980s, with the discovery of the Turkana Boy in Kenya, that we knew just how important a predecessor *Homo erectus* was.
One afternoon later, Kamoya Kimeu found a small piece of a hominid’s brow ridge on a hill. They started digging out a set of *Homo erectus* bones from a nine to twelve year old boy who died 1.5 million years ago. One guy said that the set had "all the modern human body structure." The Turkana Boy “was clearly one of us."
Kimeu also found a 1.7 million year old woman’s skeleton that showed that she had a chronic disease from eating the livers of carnivores, called hypervitaminosis A. And, the spots on her bones showed that she lasted like, weeks, or months, and didn’t die. Someone must have been taking care of her. This was the first sign of tenderness found in the evolution of hominids.
Studies have found that *Homo erectus* skulls contained, or at least might contain, Broca’s convolution, an area in the brain that’s tied to speech. Even so, *Homo erectus’s* Broca’s convolution wasn’t big or complicated enough for them to know a language. At best, they might have been able to communicate like chimpanzees,
For a while, *Homo erectus* seems to have been the only *Homo* left. They moved all over the place, super quick. They made it to Java at, or before, the time that they left Africa.
It is thought by some scientists that humans might actually have come from Asia. That humans came from outside of Africa is, practically speaking, unthinkable.
As for why *Homo erectus* was everywhere shortly after emerging in Africa, there are a few convincing thoughts. For one, dating early humans has a wide margin of error. The other is, as the authors of *Java Man* write, that Turkana’s, “Skeletal remains cannot be compared with those of any species because there is nothing comparable.”
It looks like 1 million years ago, some of the more modern *Homo erectus* species left Africa and braved the globe. Adapting as they moved, crossing mountains, deserts, and working against the challenges they’d meet, and over time they’d adapt to different climates and food sources. And, something that still makes no sense today is how they moved across the arid West of the Red Sea.
This, it would seem, is where the consistent agreements stop. What happened in the next phase of human history is something that’s been argued about non-stop since we found out about the topic.
But, before we continue with that, just remember that, what we’ve got to this point in this history is, after more than five million years of evolution, it’s that a modern-day human has 98.4% of the same stuff as today’s chimpanzee. And this change makes a much bigger difference than what separates a zebra and a horse, or what separates a dolphin and a porpoise.