It looks like the story of the human migration out of Africa was a bit more complicated than a situation where one day some homo sapiens in Africa decided to head for the distant hills. For starters, as noted on this page, the animal believed to be the predecessor of the animal homo sapien (yes, we are animals), homo erectus, first appeared in Africa about 1.8 million years ago and then spread into Asia and Europe. According to this wikipedia article homo erectus used stone tools, and possibly had some ability to control fire. Recent evidence, as reported by the science daily website, suggests that the earliest examples of the species homo sapien showed up in Africa about 195 000 years ago, so that’s quite a bit of a gap between tool using homo erectus and homo sapeins. Basically there were stone tool using animals hanging out in many parts of the world for hundreds of thousands of years before humans appeared.
Even more interesting, according to the science daily article, it took homo sapiens about 150 000 years to then start doing any of the cultural stuff we generally associate with humans. Until then, homo sapiens, although genetically distinct, weren’t doing much else to distinguish themselves, aside from making slow improvements to stone tool technology. Then, about 50 000 years ago, things seemed to take off culturally, for reasons that aren’t yet known- with art, burial rituals, etc.
So where do the
lice fit in? Apparently, researchers have been able to use lice genes to
date the appearance of human clothes. That’s because the appearance of
clothes provided the lice with a new habitat, and a new type of louse- the
body louse- was born. Based on this, humans started wearing clothes
roughly 70 000 years ago. Isn’t science fun?
posted at 18:10 on Thu, 22 Jun, 2006 |
path: /living
All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.