asteroids volcanoes a lack of oxygen these were just some of the ways that life was almost snuffed out on our planet but Against All Odds humans have managed to survive so how did we go from Tiny molecules to taking over the entire world well we'll take you on a journey through time that explores the evolution of humans in 20 minutes who who the heck is Luca is it Evolution's fault that we're all wearing braces and wait a minute do we all really have the same great great great grandmother 4 and2 billion years ago 4 and
A2 billion years ago something absolutely mindblowing happened and I'm not talking about the big bang believe it or not this second act might be even Wilder I talking about a biogenesis the beginning of Life from non-life Imagine a soup of ammonia methane and hydrogen in a hot broth of water this could be cooking in a volcanic vent deep in the ocean instead of curry powder Mother Earth probably added some sulfur nickel and iron to the broth molten rock underneath then heated things up over millions of years these molecules Clash together to form chains of amino
acids like lysine lactic acid and Ura these may have been the building blocks of life in the end some of these chains started replicating and voila molecules became replicating cells we now have life on Earth okay it's probably not that simple but this was roughly how the very first single celled organism came to be probably in a deep sea hydrothermal vent meet Luca the last Universal common ancestor humans animals Fung guy not so Fung guys trees we can all Trace our existence back to this Critter one of the countless differences between modern humans and our
friend Luca here is that he was not self-conscious and while we may have tons of information on how we developed our big brains and started walking on two feet our leap to self-consciousness is still a little mysterious let's take a moment to explore this a bit further because there are some pretty wild ideas out there some philosophers have even proposed that the key that unlocked our self-consciousness was psychedelic mushrooms yeah the theory goes that our ability to use language reflect on ourselves and perform other unique human brain functions might all stem from ancient ancestors who
consumed psilocybin mushrooms the Psychedelic molecules Within These mushrooms are known to De pattern the brain alter modes of perception and encourage social bonding which could be the perfect ingredients for the emergence of human consciousness and if you're doubting the power of these little psychedelic molecules well all you need to do is look at how they're being used today one biopharmaceutical company called sibin is using them to solve one of Humanity's biggest problems depression and anxiety depression is a chronic illness that affects about 280 million people worldwide and it costs the global economy 1 trillion dollars
each year in Lost productivity now sibin is developing safe and effective psychedelic based therapies with top Partners creating scalable synthetic novel psychedelic molecules for inpatient depression treatment instead of the bandage solution of anti-depressants which just numb the symptoms through daily use sibin offers a long-term fix in just a couple of doses this might sound like something from the future but the company is already gaining traction they got the fda's breakthrough therapy designation which means a FasTrack for their drug development process this is the first known time the FDA has granted the status for a psychedelic
based therapy for major depressive disorder sibin recently had no issue raising $150 million in capital and following a positive FDA meeting they're set to launch phase three trials in the US and Europe with all clinical supplies ready to go and Sila cybin isn't the only powerful psychedelic sibin has another exciting program in phase two for general anxiety disorder use that's a novel DMT drug expected to offer a breakthrough in delivery time compared to existing drugs in the sector they're predicting about a 90-minute experience which could really transform how many patients get through a therapy session
per day you know it's pretty wild to think that the same psychedelics that are healing our minds today may have played a key role in shaping them in the first place but we're getting a little ahead of ourselves in order to be self-conscious we need a brain first so let's get back to our timeline 3 and5 billion years ago before we humans can enter the scene we need one very important thing and that's oxygen Earth used to be full of nitrogen hydrogen water vapor and carbon dioxide it wasn't until cyano bacteria came along that we
got the precious oxygen that we humans need 1 billion years ago fast forward to 1 billion years ago when Earth was shifting around creating different supercontinents you had rodina and then a couple of hundred million years later another supercontinent penosha formed near the South Pole this was also a time when single celled organisms were starting to form into the first simple animals 550 million years ago 550 million million years ago one of the most critical events in our history took place the Cambrian explosion this is when hundreds of different animals burst onto the evolutionary Scene
It was the building block for every major animal we know today including you 66 million years ago the dinosaurs ruled Earth for hundreds of millions of years and survived multiple extinctions but all good things eventually come to an end 66 million years ago an enormous asteroid hit Earth landing on the Yucatan Peninsula in today's Mexico it coughed up a ton of debris blocking the sun this finally wiped out the dinosaurs this might seem like an insignificant event for us humans but this Extinction opened up the spot for mammals to become the leaders of the animal
kingdom 40 million years ago these mammals included small furry ancestors of all primates the early primates were similar to the small rodents we see today they lived and multiplied in a unique ecological niche eating an omnivorous diet of fruits and insects they continued to evolve and their brains grew bigger without competition from the dinosaurs they were able to grow exponentially after millions of years of evolution monkeys were seen in Africa Asia and South America fast forward another several million years and apes evolved then the oritan lineage split off soon it would be our turn 8
million years ago then about 8 or 9 million years ago chuman a common ancestor to both chimpanzees and humans split into two lines chimpanzee and human for a long time biologists thought this was a clean split that created separate chimpanzee and human species but they were wrong the two lines continued to mate and exchange genes for millions of years it may have taken a full 4 million years before the two species fully broke from each other even today though we're a different species humans share an astonishing 98 to 99% of our genes with chimps so
five to six million years ago the homogenous became distinct despite being a separate line our ancestors were still pretty aplike you may have heard of Lucy a 3.2 milliony old ancestor from Ethiopia her brain was Tiny chimp sized the secret to big brains had yet to be discovered and Lucy had long arms she probably spent a lot of time swinging in the trees at night but there was one important feature that separated early humans including Lucy from apes we were bipeds walking on two legs what led to that well there are two explanations for what
got humans walking upright the first is the Savannah hypothesis according to this when forests retreated and Savannah spread humans spent more time foraging among the grasses and walking upright allowed them to see better like an SUV that Towers over all the sedans however after studying chimps in Western Tanzania some scientists believe early humans mostly walked upright in trees this may have been to gather fruit in the upper branches or to escape Predators but this theory has got some explaining to do for instance it can't explain why humans became bipeds but chimps didn't then how about
them kangaroos 2.6 million years ago about 2.6 million years ago early humans started getting the hang of things their brains began developing further which allowed them to start making tools the species behind this was Homo habilis sometimes known as handyman the early tools were only sharpened Stones it took another million years for humans to make hand axes but we'll get to that in a bit scientists don't believe these early humans were Fearless Hunters they were probably mostly scavengers eating leftovers from The Kills of saber-tooth tigers they use their tools to cut up carcasses and break
bones to get to the nutritious marrow if they got lucky they also ate zebras elephants rhinos Buffalo and giraffes but mostly they were just eating salad it's no surprise that early humans weren't all that Fearless life was dangerous we see some pretty gruesome deaths in the fossil record from 1 to 2 million years ago one adolescent was caught by a leopard and dragged up a tree a three-year-old was likely picked up by an eagle with its Talons digging into the child skull and if it wasn't a leopard or an eagle gum disease might get you
one kid got an infection after a baby tooth fell out and died of sepsis scientists even found a woman who died of vitamin A poisoning maybe she binged on animal liver I don't know about you but I'm feeling pretty lucky that I live in the present 800,000 years ago then 800,000 years ago early humans learned a new valuable skill Not only would this change the path of history but it would give today's dentists something to do but more on that in a second humans learned to control the use of fire this meant we could keep
ourselves warm scare off predators and cook meat with humans eating more meat this caused our most important organ to grow larger the brain but there was a downsize to all this new delicious cooked food it was now soft softer and easier to eat this led to humans needing to chew less and our Jaws becoming smaller and a smaller jaw means we were more likely to have crooked teeth due to crowding take a look at this caveman's teeth yeah perfectly straight because of the larger jaw size 400,000 years ago okay now that humans had fire and
food they were looking for a better form of shelter they didn't want to live in dark and dingy caves any longer they decided to start building houses now the oldest building we have a record of is from 400,000 years ago located in France this is also when homo H highle bensis enters the picture they're a key extinct species of human that were ancestors to Homo sapiens denisovans and neander between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago a group of homo H highle bensis moved from Africa to to Eurasia one subgroup moved West to Europe becoming Meander tals
another subgroup moved East into Asia to become Dennis ens a little later we'll tell you about interspecies romance so keep these players in mind meanwhile back in Africa 300,000 years ago a gradual evolutionary transition began from homo heidelbergensis to the first of our species Homo sapiens in another 150,000 years these archaic Homo sapiens further transitioned and evolved into the humans we know today fossil evidence helps us to see a transition in the physical features the size and shape of the forehead the brow Ridge and the face change over time homo heidleberg Anis had a more
prominent brow Ridge and a projecting face modern Homo sapiens skull was more rounded and bigger and they also developed a higher forehead 200,000 years ago about 200,000 years ago sometime in the middle of this transition from archaic to Modern a key female ancestor was born scientists now call her mitochondrial eve the DNA of each and every one of us tracks back to her think of her as your great great great great great great great great great great grandmother okay we've got fire shelter and a great grandma but life was still hard for early humans anything
could kill you diseases a fight over a giraffe carcass encounters with animals in Africa it was lions or venomous snakes in the Asian Tropics tigers in the Americas cougars and jaguars so the average life expectancy was only about 30 years the total number of humans on Earth was probably under 1 million 74,000 years ago then 74,000 years ago our fragile existence was threatened a super volcano erupted there was a massive global climate disruption Africa experienced increasingly dry conditions Homo sapiens came close to being wiped out maybe only 600 to 10,000 adults of reproductive age survived
during this difficult time humans seem to have broken off into smaller isolated groups as the area became drier Rivers shrank but this made aquatic life easier to catch so for a while humans ate more fish ultimately the fish may have been depleted and this was one of the likely reasons that they left Africa 60,000 years ago about 60,000 years ago modern humans began migrating Out of Africa with Waters receding new travel routes might have be become more accessible humans first went to Asia by 45,000 years ago they were settled in Indonesia paa New Guinea and
Australia now remember I said we'd tell you about romance with Dennis sens well in Asia Homo sapiens mated with denisovan populations denisovan DNA is 3 to 6% of the Genome of specific Asian populations today 40,000 years ago now around 40,000 years ago Homo sapiens made it to Europe using two paths they got into Eastern Europe from turkey and the Mediterranean Coast was another route here homo sapiens mated with neander tals in Europe and acquired genes related to skin and hair growth from them those cute freckles that you see that's from the Neals now around 15,000
years ago Homo sapiens went from Asia to North America but how well remember the topography was different though today's continents were in place a piece of land formed a bridge between Asia and North America for 5,000 years it was called beringia and it connected Eastern Siberia to Alaska after making the Trek to North America some traveled down to South America now this was the point in time when all other homo species became extinct leaving Homo sapiens as the only remaining humans left we don't know exactly why this happened but research suggests that it may have
been due to us having better survival rates or the other species were just outcompeted in some way 12,000 years ago then 12,000 years ago we reached a major turning point humans began to master far farming they grew wild varieties of peas lentils and barley and began hurting goats and oxen the first farmers lived in the Fertile Crescent a region in the Middle East but there wasn't just one group multiple unrelated groups isolated from each other all pursued farming around this time as humans became Farmers population growth picked up by 1 AD our population was about
170 Mill ion in the 14th century we were hit by the Bubonic plague it wiped out 50 million people of a worldwide population of just about 450 million it took two whole centuries for Europe's population to recover to pre plague levels 250 years ago 250 years ago the Industrial Revolution began our world transformed from Rural and agricultural to Urban and industrialized our population started to grow rapidly we hit 1 billion people in 1804 and in 2023 we were at 8 billion our growth has been exponential but humans have needed vast amounts of energy first we
got this from coal then from oil and natural gas now we're on the path to harvesting solar power discovering new technology and space travel who knows what the future holds for Humanity maybe it's becoming a type one civilization but that sounds like a story for another what if
