200 thousand years. 200 millennia, two thousand centuries, 2 million and 400 thousand months, 73 million days, 1 billion and 752 million hours. What was our planet like, all that time ago?
The world in the year 198,000 BC was in some ways very similar to, and in some ways very different from, the world today. Today, we are going to understand how the geography, the megafauna and which human beings inhabited planet Earth were like, 200 thousand years ago. There are no boring or unimportant moments in the history of life, but some moments, like the one we are going to visit, harbor events so important that they change the entire history of life on the planet.
This is my way of saying thank you for the incredible milestone of 200,000 subscribers to this channel, and I hope you like it! My name is Abner and welcome to ABC Terra! Let's locate ourselves in time.
In geological terms, 200,000 years is not that long. That's an amount of time that has passed 330 times in the last 66 million years since the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. So looking from afar, we see that we're very close to the present, and almost all of the Cenozoic, the age of mammals, has already happened by this time.
We are taking a small step back in the immense marathon of time. We are in the Pleistocene, the epoch from 2. 6 million to 12,000 years ago, when the current epoch begins: the Holocene.
(or Anthropocene, depends on who you ask) But at the end of the Pleistocene, the changes that would come were already beginning to be announced. This was a time of transition in many ways. 10 thousand generations of human beings have lived since then, facing practically the same challenges as always: hunger, thirst, cold, heat, animals.
Let that sink in for a moment. If a time machine left you lost and stunned at this moment on the planet, not even the sky could help you locate yourself. The constellations would not be the same and some of the stars would be unrecognizable.
In 200 thousand years, few, but some of the stars in the sky will have exploded and become nebulae, much less luminous. Other stars would not have been born yet. But no stars would be in exactly the same place.
We may even think that the sky is static, because in the time we have to live, it is impossible to notice any difference, but in fact, it is in motion. Like planets revolving around the Sun, our entire solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way, like any star in it. A complete circuit takes 230 million years.
The last time the Sun passed this point in the galaxy, dinosaurs were just beginning to take over the world. It was the middle of the Triassic. We'll come back to that moment in a moment.
The stars closest to the Sun are the ones that seem to move the most, the farthest ones the least, just like on the road, a road sign seems to pass faster than a mountain in the landscape. When our ancestors looked at the sky 10,000 generations ago, they saw different shapes, but they could also be mistaken for the constellations to be permanent. What was the geography and climate of our world like 200 millennia ago?
Looking at Earth from a spaceship, you would have a hard time finding any difference from Earth today. Of course, disregarding all of the recent human transformation, because obviously, Earth didn't glow at night 200,000 years ago. This feature became prominent about 150 years ago.
Tectonic plates never stop moving. Africa and South America, for example, move 3 cm apart per year, and in 200,000 years, they have become 6 km further apart. Sea level, humidity, temperature, coastlines would be familiar to present-day inhabitants, with the difference being a few degrees cooler than average today.
Okay, maybe your favorite beach was a few hundred meters away, but few details would be visibly noticeable from space. You would have to get closer, look at the rivers, the deltas, the islands, to see the physical changes that have taken place since then. But on a planetary scale, that's not a large enough amount of time to bring about such brutal changes in geography as India's collision with Asia, forming the Himalayas, for example.
Incredibly, the view of Earth 26,000 years ago would have been much different. That was the last glacial maximum, a very cold and dry time in the planet's history. Average temperatures were nearly 10 degrees lower than today, and as a result, more water was trapped in the form of ice and less evaporation was taking place on the ocean's surface.
These peaks of intense glaciation are what people usually think of as ice ages, but it's more complicated. 200,000 years ago we were in an ice age, and we're still in an ice age. This is the Pleistocene glaciation, which starts, you guessed it, with the Pleistocene, 2.
6 million years ago. Unlike what most people think, ice ages are not times when the planet is completely frozen. Some of them were like that, but this is an extreme event that last happened on the cryogenian, the snowball earth.
But that's 800 million years ago, no glaciation of this extent has happened since the origin of animals, and if it had, it probably would have been enough to reset the entire biosphere back to bacteria. So our geological definition of an ice age is any time when the Earth has two frozen poles, that is, times when a cryosphere is configured. Each glaciation is unique, but the one we are experiencing today has a very striking feature : an almost regular but unpredictable oscillation of cycles of glaciation and interglaciation.
We live today in an interglacial period that started about 12,000 years ago, the Holocene. Interglacial periods are short summers of a few tens of thousands of years in which, without leaving a state of glaciation, the Earth experiences a warmer and wetter climate. They punctuate periods of more intense glaciation, which can last much longer, up to hundreds of thousands of years, in which the polar ice caps expand, the sea level drops hundreds of meters and the biomes move to adapt to the drier climate and more cold.
As much as I have a strong zoological bias in this channel, it is the plants that suffer most from climate change, as they are extremely sensitive even to small variations. This glaciation that began more than 2. 6 million years ago was a blow to animal diversity, and these glacial and interglacial cycles end up being a constant ordeal for life on the planet.
Even so, these climatic variations occur on a scale of thousands of years, and not in decades as the human being has done today. Some may say that global warming is not a concern, since we are in an ice age and since the climate is always changing, but three things need to be remembered: The first is that evolution can indeed deal with changes and it is true that a planet Warmer weather has been home to healthy ecosystems in the deep past, but it's all about speed. Animals and plants need time for evolution to produce the necessary adaptations to face climate change, and what humans are doing is thousands of times faster than nature is able to keep up for the most part.
That's why we're experiencing a mass extinction right now. The second is that it is not just temperature that is the problem, but also all chemical, plastic, radioactive pollution , habitat destruction, etc. And the third is that we were already in one of the hottest moments of the glaciation when people started to warm the planet, and if we leave the glaciation point, the climate could undergo a generalized restructuring that will affect all people and forms of life.
life on this planet. It is precisely BECAUSE we are in an ice age that global warming is a major concern. You can be sure that you DON'T want this ice age to end, because humanity doesn't know how to live on a greenhouse Earth, I assure you.
That's why 200,000 years ago the world wouldn't have been so brutally different, because we were also in an interglaciation. But the trend was already towards cooling, and soon, a new phase of intense glaciation would set in, another interglaciation between 130-110 thousand years ago would happen and give way to another intense cooling that lasted until 12 thousand years ago, when we enter in the current interglaciation. That is, 200 thousand years ago we were in the penultimate interglaciation.
To understand how and why our world was the way it was 200,000 years ago, we need to go back in time. Hm… no more! Much more.
That! This is the Triassic, the first period of the age of dinosaurs. If you look closely, you'll notice that Pangea gathers all the Earth's masses into a single continent.
This resulted in a certain homogeneity in the fauna at that time, and allowed dinosaurs to dominate all terrestrial ecosystems on the planet. As Pangea fragmented during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, different dinosaurs dominated different parts of the globe, but their dominance remained global. That is, until the fateful day when a 12km-wide meteor slammed into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in a Cretaceous spring 66 million years ago.
The mass extinction that wiped out all creatures over 10kg in the early decades of the Cenozoic put an end to dinosaur dominance, but it was a huge opportunity for all survivors! The winners in the extinction lottery were: Lepidosaurs such as lizards and snakes. The crocodiles, alligators and gharials And some groups that seem to survive anything, like chelonians.
I love you terrestrial tortoise. And the tuataras who… honestly what are you still doing here? But glad they still exist.
Let's group them all as reptiles. And here it comes: The avian dinosaurs The marsupial mammals and the placental mammals. All these groups had a chance to take the place of the dinosaurs, occupying their niches and fulfilling their now empty ecological roles.
But there was a problem with the plan to conquer the world: it was no longer possible for a land animal to spread across the world, because this time the continents were separated. Antarctica and Australia still formed a single land mass. South America and Africa were isolated continents, but South America would remain so for much longer, and Africa was destined to soon meet Eurasia, raising Europe, which was mostly submerged by this time.
North America maintained a permanent connection with Asia, between Siberia and Alaska. The consequence of this is that for the next 60 million years, the age of mammals was divided into 3 major ecodomains, each with its own independent evolutionary history. One that extends from North America to Afroeurasia, being the largest of all by far, but two others, each with its particular fauna: South America and Australia.
5 million years ago, South America ceased to be isolated and became more connected with the rest of the world, when the isthmus of Panama appeared in Central America. This caused animals from the North to move to the South for the first time and vice versa, which ended with the extinction of a good part of the originally South American megafauna. But let's understand which groups dominated in each ecodomain during most of the Cenozoic: the age of mammals!
Of course, there are many niches, but for the sake of gross simplification, I want to divide the ecological roles of terrestrial vertebrates into 3 categories: Carnivores, Herbivores, and Generalists. Thus, let's understand the evolutionary context of animal communities from 200 millennia ago. In the largest ecodomain of the Cenozoic, placental mammals managed to conquer the 3 great niches, carnivory, herbivory and generalism.
Therefore, the world of 200,000 years ago reflects this reality. Many animals characteristic of Africa inhabited both Asia, Europe and North America, such as lions, hyenas, elephants, rhinos, camels, among many others. The presence of megafauna created an immense corridor of open areas where today the temperate coniferous forests are established .
This was by far the largest ecosystem on Earth, an icy savannah dubbed the “mammoth steppe”, where the most charismatic animals of the ice age megafauna inhabited. But this savanna configuration remained even during the interglaciations, throughout the Pleistocene, and in geochronological terms, it just collapsed. The Pleistocene megafauna just took a very hard hit, and a large portion of the planet's megafauna went extinct in a brief period of time that coincides with the beginning of the current interglaciation.
The extent of humanity's share of blame for this extinction is still hotly debated. With the megafauna virtually extinct, the trees, which were previously trampled and knocked down, began to grow. What was an immense, populous and diverse savannah until 10,000 years ago, has become a monotonous forest poor in both animal and plant diversity.
So, even though we were in an interglaciation 200,000 years ago, these northern hemisphere forests were much more constrained, and in their place was a cold version of the African savannah. Instead of elephants, we had mammoths. Instead of rhinos, we had… woolly rhinos.
And so on. But some animals stand out. One of the amazing animals that co-inhabited Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent with our ancestors was Sivatherium.
This animal is probably the largest giraffe and the largest ruminant that ever lived, with an imposing appearance and two pairs of horns on its head. It had a look that would remind you of a gigantic Okapi, and this amazing animal may have lived as recently as 8,000 years ago. Some rock art in Africa appears to match the skeletons of this animal, meaning they were part of the landscape for the overwhelming majority of human history.
And yet, Sivatherium was just one genus among many giraffids that once populated the planet. Another fascinating animal that may have coexisted with other human beings, such as homo erectus, is Gigantopithecus. It was the largest primate that ever existed, and inhabited the forests of India, China and Vietnam between 5 million and 100 thousand years ago.
He was close to orangutans, could reach 3 meters in height and weigh an incredible 600 kg. Gigantopithecus' diet, like that of the panda, consisted almost entirely of bamboo and fruit, and the causes of its extinction are still controversial. 200 millennia ago the sight of Gigantopithecus to tiny Homo erectus, or even Denisovans, might have been downright intimidating.
They would still live for a hundred thousand years at that point, before they would be forgotten by time. Every species of elephant that exists today existed at that time, plus many others. In Eurasia, the woolly mammoth, the most famous of the mammoths, inhabited from Europe to Siberia along the entire length of the mammoth steppe!
We know this species intimately, even down to the genetic level. It was possible to sequence the genome of this extinct mammoth from samples of organic material preserved by permafrost, the frozen ground in the Arctic Circle. Sometimes we are lucky enough to find entire individuals, with levels of detail such as the fur and the last meal still preserved, as is the case of the Yuba puppy.
There are now serious plans to bring this species back to life, for a project to rebuild the arctic ecosystem called “pleistocene park”, but that is a story for another video. But cloning cannot be done with specimens from 200,000 years ago, because the genetic material degenerates very quickly. The sequenced specimens are at least 160,000 years younger.
This is one of the most charismatic species of the ice age lived until about 4000 years ago, with a last population on Wrangel Island. We know that not only were mammoths hunted for their meat, but also that their bones served as building material for huts and temples, but the evidence for this is not very old. In North America, however, the Columbian mammoth dominated, a species considerably larger than the woolly mammoth, being one of the largest proboscideans of all time.
Just as today's elephants had their furry versions, rhinos were once quite common across Eurasia. The genus Elasmotherium is the best known of the ice age rhinos. Cave paintings show that our ancestors lived with and hunted these animals, which may have become extinct around 30 millennia ago.
The first reconstructions show Elasmotherium with a huge pointed horn, but more recent studies point to another shape, like a dome. Smilodon is the most famous predator of the Pleistocene, a genus of saber-toothed tigers that weren't exactly tigers, as the popular name suggests. It lived, like much of the ice age megafauna, until 10,000 years ago in North and South America.
Here, they must have avoided competition with jaguars by specializing in larger prey, which could also be the cause of their extinction. The upper canine teeth were very long and thick, but also fragile, meaning they could not rely solely on their teeth for hunting. Its arms are stronger than the average feline, and it appears that these were what the Smilodon species depended on to bring down their prey.
A wide variety of wild bovids roamed from Africa to Eurasia, but perhaps the most impressive of all is Pelorovis. This African bovine had an impressive horn, the functions of which are still debated. It may have lived as recently as 4 millennia ago, and its coexistence with humans is also documented in rock art.
But the most important and present bovid in all of human history was the Aurochs. This wild ox gave rise to all modern cattle breeds, in a few independent events of domestication. Its distribution was extremely wide, from Siberia to Europe and India.
Aurochs became extinct during the late Holocene due to habitat loss and hunting, when the last individual died out in 1627 in Jaktorów Forest, Poland. But attempts to recreate the aurochs by crossing different breeds of cattle have already happened, and as much as the result looks superficially like an aurochs, genetically it is another story. To end our analysis of what this great ecodomain looked like 200,000 years ago, let's take a quick trip to Madagascar.
Here, on one of the largest islands in the world, biogeography and evolution have worked their magic, producing a peculiar fauna, certainly worth a video of its own. Vorombe is probably the largest bird that ever lived, being the heaviest dinosaur to have lived since the Mesozoic. Known as elephant birds, they could weigh almost 600 kg and be 4 meters tall.
Despite its size, this was an opportunistic herbivore rather than a ferocious hunter. With all the hunting and searching for eggs, this animal ended up extinct recently, in the year 1000 after Christ. Now let's see what was happening in the Southern Hemisphere, 200 thousand years ago, with the 3 remaining continents: South America, Antarctica and Australia.
There isn't much to say about Antarctica in this period, as that continent was nearly sterilized by freezing temperatures over 40 million years ago. But if it still had a diverse native fauna and flora, it would probably have more similarities with Australia, the last continent to have contact with Antarctica 90 million years ago, and that's what we're going to talk about. Australia is known even today as a place of animals completely different from the rest of the world, dominated by marsupials, but 200,000 years ago this was even more pronounced!
Let's see who was occupying each ecological role on the Australian continent: Generalism was conquered by marsupial mammals, as well as herbivory, but the predator position was dominated by reptiles, mainly because they are more adapted to arid climates like the Australian one. Let's meet these animals. One of Australia's most important and enduring predators was Quinkana, a fully quadrupedal, long-legged land crocodile .
Land crocodiles are something that happens every now and then in evolution, but this is the one that lived until more recently, having appeared almost 30 million years ago and surviving until 10,000. Quinkana could measure 3 meters in length and weigh 200 kg. Another giant reptile that terrorized the life of Australian megafauna was Megalania, a giant relative of Komodo dragons, which in turn are already giant versions of varanid monitor lizards.
Megalania could reach 5 meters in length, and if its hunting strategy is similar to that of today's Komodo dragons, it was capable of feeding on even the largest animals. animals of the time. It coexisted for a few millennia with the first aboriginal peoples of Australia, before becoming extinct about 40,000 years ago.
Here, it is shown preying on a Genyornis, a giant herbivorous bird that is also noteworthy . They competed with smaller mammalian carnivores , such as the Thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf, which already existed 200,000 years ago and only became extinct in 1938. But also Thylacoleo, a predator unlike anything existing today, closer to wombats, and with arboreal habits.
Thylacoleo carnifex means carnivorous marsupial lion, and its most distinctive feature was its sharp incisor teeth, not the canines as in most carnivorous placentals. But it likely specialized in smaller prey, such as kangaroos, unlike its carnivorous reptilian companions at the time. Another giant reptile worthy of mention in the Australian fauna was Meiolania.
A land tortoise over eight feet long, with horns on its head and a spiked tail. Meiolania also lived for a long time, over 20 million years until it became extinct about 4,000 years ago on the islands of New Caledonia. Among the most prominent herbivores of the time were Procoptodon, a genus of giant kangaroos that, like horses, walked on one toe.
Some say that its weight, around 300 kg, would make it impossible for it to move by hopping, like current kangaroos, and that its anatomy suggests that it walked with one leg at a time. The genus was present until at least around 45,000 years ago before becoming extinct, although some evidence indicates that it may have survived as late as 18,000 years ago. But by far the largest animal that existed in Australia 200,000 years ago was Diprotodon, which was also the largest marsupial that ever lived.
Its name means two teeth pointing forward, suggesting that it could feed not only on leaves, but also buried roots rich in water and nutrients. Looking like a wombat 2 meters tall at the shoulders and weighing 1500 kg, Diprotodon may have lived with Australian aborigines for over ten millennia, before becoming extinct around 40,000 years ago, having lasted for most of the Pleistocene. The last animal from the Pleistocene Australian megafauna that I separated to show you is Palorchestes, a creature whose life habits and appearance are still considerably mysterious.
In dimensions, it would be comparable to a horse, and evolutionarily, it is close to diprotodon. The Palorchestes species had four powerful paws, with the front paws having large claws, similar to those of a koala, which they probably used to knock down leaves and strip the bark from trees. The long symphysis of the lower jaw of all Palorchestes species indicates that their tongues were long and strong, like that of a giraffe.
The appearance of these animals' nasal bones suggests that they possessed a small proboscis, leading to the nickname "marsupial tapir". Now that we've covered two of the three ecodomains on the planet during that time, let's move on to the last, and most amazing in my opinion: South America! Like Australia, our continent also had an independent evolutionary history, being an isolated continent since before the end of the Cretaceous.
Also like Australia, it was not home to any humanity of any kind at this time. But unlike Australia, South America established contact with the rest of the world between 5-3 million years ago, when the uplift of the Isthmus of Panama made the great American exchange possible. In this event, animals from the North migrated to the South and vice versa.
200,000 years ago, South America was a great mixture of animals originating from and immigrants from the north. For a large part of its history, South America was the only continent where dinosaurs were able to once again dominate the meat-eating niche. The heyday of terror birds, predators that reached absurd speeds, with a pointed beak, ended when competition with northern predators put too much strain on these incredible animals.
But for nearly 3 million years they were even able to invade North America. North and briefly diversify, as do giant sloths. 200,000 years ago, placental mammals already occupied all the major ecological roles in South America, but never without competition from marsupials and birds.
If we could go back in time to see what South America was like at that time, there's a chance we'd find the last terror birds: the Psilopterus. They were a small but ancient species of terror bird that may have lived very similarly to the siriema, their closest living relative. This last genus of Phorusrhacidea may have survived until very recently, around 20,000 years ago.
The most famous, fascinating and charismatic animals of all the South American endemic Cenozoic are the giant sloths, without a doubt. They were a diverse group of ground sloths, which could reach sizes comparable to elephants, such as megatherium. Its anatomy, with short legs, a wide pelvis and long arms, suggests that this animal spent a lot of time sitting down, pulling branches to feed.
They were one of the first fossils to be recognized as an extinct animal, by naturalist Georges Cuvier. Like terror birds, they also invaded North America about 4 million years ago, becoming extinct on both continents nearly 10,000 years ago. She is a xenarthro, an order of mammals originating from our continent, which includes sloths, armadillos and anteaters.
These sloths are also known for the immense paleoburrows they dig, sometimes hundreds of meters deep, in a complex of tunnels that can only have been the work of many generations of sloths. These holes are so big that it is possible to walk comfortably standing in some of them. 200,000 years ago, they were still very common across the continent, as were their burrows.
The first humans to colonize South America , around 15,000 years ago, certainly encountered these animals, and their memory can be preserved in folkloric legends, such as that of the mapinguari. Another incredible animal that inhabited the Brazilian cerrado was the Notiomastodon. Although it can be mistaken for an elephant, superficially, it is actually from another family of proboscideans, the Gomphotherios.
Notiomastodon was similar in size to the Asian elephant, and had a rather generalist habit, as indicated by its dentition. 200,000 years ago, they thrived on our continent, becoming extinct only approximately 11,000 years ago. The association of skeletons from this animal with human artifacts suggests that humans played a role in its extinction.
But these Gomphoterios came from North America during the great exchange, unlike Toxodon, a genus belonging to an originally South American order of mammals called Notoungulata. This super diverse order, with more than 150 genera described, ranged from rabbit-like animals to rhinoceros-like ones, such as the Toxodons. They were herbivores that could weigh 1500 kg, and be up to 2.
5 meters long. Mixotoxodon was the only member of the group to succeed in invading Central America and southern North America, reaching as far north as Texas. They were present throughout our continent's Cenozoic, and guess when they disappeared?
10 thousand years ago. Charles Darwin studied a Toxodon skull he bought from a farmer in Uruguay, describing it as one of the strangest animals ever found. He was confused, as the skull was as big as a hippo's, but the teeth looked like rodents.
An animal unlike any living thing. That was one of his inspirations for Origin of Species. Macrauchenia was a Litoptern, another originally South American order, closely related to the Notoungulates.
Its resemblance to Llamas caught the attention of its discoverers, but it is only superficial. The shape of the skull opens the possibility of speculating the presence of a short trunk, as it was represented in “the ice age”. It had 3 fingers and was an important part of the South American megafauna, also becoming extinct 10 thousand years ago.
And speaking of another animal that disappeared around this time, Glyptodon was a genus giant armadillo, which lived here and eventually colonized parts of North America during the Pleistocene. Imagine an armadillo: an armadillo the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. This was Glyptodon.
He was probably one of the most targeted prey of the first humans to colonize the Americas, as they had adaptations that defended them from other types of predators. Many of the fossils found are turned upside down, a position in which they would be most vulnerable. Some older, related animals converged with ankylosaurs, developing a bony club at the end of their tail, which is, in my opinion, one of the most amazing weapons evolution has ever produced.
This was our continent 200,000 years ago. To complete a panorama of how our planet was, 200 millennia in the past, the present human species could not be missing. Unlike today, where only one human species exists, at that time, six different humanities inhabited planet Earth.
The more we learn about these other human species, the more we understand just how much like us they were. Traits that we used to think belonged only to our species, in fact, already existed in many representatives of the genus Homo, such as language, material culture, symbolic rituals and the domain of fire. We underestimate our human cousins and are slowly deconstructing the “Uga Buga” stereotype of dumb and animalistic cavemen.
Another thing that has changed a lot is our own view of evolution. Until a century ago, the view of orthogenesis dominated, the famous iconography of evolution that… frankly is one of the things I hate the most. Most people who try to disprove evolution by saying "But if man came from apes, why are there still apes?
" they think that's what evolution is: a row of species, one better than the other, culminating in a perfect being: the human being. But that couldn't be more wrong. Evolution does not mean improvement, nor complexification, nor does it work the same as pokemón.
Just as your grandfather didn't become your father who didn't become you, human beings did not come from chimpanzees, and yes, modern humans and chimpanzees descend from a common ancestor that lived about 7 million years ago, and one is as evolved as the other. other. The phylogenetic view of evolution is like a tree, in which species diversify and create new branches.
But even more modernly, we have realized that on small scales, evolution can be more like a web than a tree, since with a certain frequency, closely related species end up producing hybrids. This process is of great importance in the evolution of our species, as we will see when we get to know each of the human species that lived at that time. Homo erectus was the longest-lived human species: it lived more than 2 million years in all, which is a lot compared to our species' 300,000 years .
They appear to have been the first modern humans, and may be the ancestors of all of the humanities that will be named below. They may have been the first to use symbolic languages, master fire, and live in larger groups. Because of its wide geographic and temporal distribution, Homo erectus has a lot of variation in size and shape, and other species may fall within that name.
The only fossil evidence of groups of H. erectus comes from 4 sites in Kenya, where 97 footprints made 1. 5 million years ago were likely left by a group of at least 20 individuals.
One of these tracks, based on the size of the footprints, may have been an all- male group, which could indicate that they were some specialized task group, such as a hunting or patrol group. If correct, this would also indicate the sexual division of labor that distinguishes human societies from those of other great apes and social carnivorous mammals. But 200 millennia ago, the glory days of Homo Erectus were long gone, it was an endangered species, just a few millennia away from extinction.
Homo heidelbergensis was a human species from the Mediterranean region, between Europe and Africa, which may have been a common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthalensis. The use of fire became common among them 400,000 years ago, which means that they were already intimate with fire 200,000 years ago. years at that time, approximately.
They appeared 700 millennia ago, and at that time, they were on the brink of extinction. We also don't know much about the Denisovans, an Asian humanity that appears to have hybridized with both Neanderthals and Sapiens. A first-generation hybrid teenage girl nicknamed "Denny" was discovered with a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother.
Furthermore, 4% of the Denisovan genome comes from an unknown archaic human species that diverged from modern humans more than a million years ago. This ease of hybridization between human species seems to support the hypothesis that they all descend from a relatively recent common ancestor. They disappeared from much of Asia 30,000 years ago, but may have remained in isolated places as late as 15,000 years ago.
Most of what we know about them comes from the analysis of their teeth, more complete fossils are yet to be discovered. One of the most incredible humanities that existed 200,000 years ago was a people native to the island of Flores, Homo floresiensis. He is nicknamed the Hobbit, as the island's biogeography has shrunk them down to 1.
10 in height, while maintaining the proportions of archaic humans. This hominid existed until 50,000 years ago, its disappearance coincides with the arrival of modern humans in the region. Skeletal material from Homo floresiensis is now dated to 60,000 to 100,000 years ago; Stone tools recovered alongside the skeletal remains were from archaeological horizons ranging from 50,000 to 190,000 years ago.
The arrival of the Sapiens, and possibly Denisovans, may have been a type of giant invasion for this small people. The most famous of the hominids that coexisted with our species 200,000 years ago were the Neanderthals. This human being was shorter, more muscular, had proportionately shorter limbs, but a more robust complexion, with a larger brain on average than Sapiens.
Unlike the last mentioned hominids, Neanderthals left a lot of evidence of their existence behind! In part, it's because they were in the habit of burying their dead, which helps preserve the skeleton. Some of these dead were found filled with ornaments and what was interpreted as personal belongings.
This may seem trivial to us, but it is evidence that their minds had the capacity to produce a symbolic blueprint of reality, with some kind of mythology and belief in the transcendent involved. Only people with that kind of understanding of the world would be able to bury their dead, or even care for community members who would be unable to live alone. Many Neanderthal skeletons show signs of healing from severe injuries, meaning they may have been unable to hunt for months, years, or even permanently.
Only a sense of community, empathy and, ultimately, the ability to love one's fellow humans could a Neanderthal survive the wounds inflicted by the cruel world of 200,000 years ago. Today, we imagine that these people were capable of speaking, telling stories and abstracting the past and the future. This is very different from what we initially thought.
In the beginning, Neanderthal skeletons were assembled to appear purposely stupid People were not able to accept that there was another species of human being as intelligent as ours, to the point that anatomist Ernst Haeckel tried to name the species “Homo stupidus” Neanderthals have a long evolutionary history. The earliest known examples of Neanderthal-like fossils are around 430,000 years old. The best-known Neanderthals lived between about 130,000 and 40,000 years ago, after which all physical evidence of them disappears.
200,000 years ago, Neanderthals had been around for at least 230,000 years, and they were 100,000 years from their peak and 160,000 years from their extinction. By this time, they were already capable of producing tools such as stone arrowheads. Its distribution across Europe and the Middle East overlapped with that of homo sapiens, and genetic evidence suggests that this may explain its demise.
People with sub-Saharan ethnic backgrounds, like the native peoples of Africa, India and Oceania, it has no trace of Neanderthal DNA, unlike other human races that can have up to 4% of Neanderthal DNA in their genome! This means that interbreeding between the two species was once common, and that the extinction of pure Neanderthals may not have been due to their inferiority and stupidity, but to their similarity to us, who look at this other humanity and see something familiar. In a way, Neanderthals, who lived more widely, may have been genetically absorbed into the ever-growing Sapien populations.
But where were we 200,000 years ago? For a long time, scientists imagined that humanity would have emerged during this time, but more recent findings extend the history of our species by 100,000 years. The first Homo Sapiens lived in East Africa 300,000 years ago.
They shared the world with 5 other humanities at least. Our ancestors at that time had black skin , and were skilled makers of tools, such as spears, bows and arrows. This meant that we didn't have to get as close to hunting as the Neanderthals, for example.
Which may have made us efficient hunters. And maybe even too efficient. It wasn't easy and not all at once in a linear fashion, but humans slowly conquered spaces on every continent in the world over the next 180,000 years, the last place to be populated being South America.
Apparently, our arrival in different regions of the world is related to the disappearance of megafauna and other humanities. Our species, like all humanities, emerged during the Pleistocene glaciation, a delicate moment for the entire biosphere, like any ice age. Perhaps ecosystems were already weakened when humans arrived, and our pressure may have been too much for many of these animals.
But this mystery is far from solved, as humans traversed several interglaciations before the collapse that happened at the beginning of the Holocene, 10,000 years ago. This is the time when agriculture starts, but that's a story for another video. 200 millennia ago, lived the ancestors of all human beings alive today, more than 11 thousand generations in the past.
This group, until then confined to Africa, was destined to know the whole world, with its generalist skills that made it capable of conquering almost any territory. It is their story, which 200,000 years later would produce our world. There are many other aspects of our world at that fascinating time, which I couldn't cover in this video, but let us know in the comments if you enjoyed getting to know the megafauna of that time and what questions you have left from this video!
Also tell me what other moments in the history of our world you would like to know! Don't forget to subscribe for more lost in time stories and share with friends who might be interested in the topic. Thank you very much and have a great life!
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