Becoming Human Timeline

5-8 million years ago

Pre apes and pre humans diverge.

Cool & dry

In the beginning, 14-15 billion years ago there was the Big Bang. About 4.6 billion years ago the earth and the solar system reached there present form. Less than half a billion years later there was life. For 3 billion years blue green algae filled the atmosphere with oxygen. At 1 billion years you get sponges. Half a billion years ago you get Trilobites. 430 million years ago you get the first land plants. 220 million years ago the first mammals. At 200 million pangaea splits and we start to get the formation of the continents as we know them. At 80 million years ago we get the first mammals. The ancestral Rocky Mtns are formed around 70 million years ago. The first ape-like creatures show up around 35M. They were so widespread that they lived even in North America.

Eventually, the better-adapted monkeys pushed the apes to refuges, primarily in Africa. There, some six million years ago, a hominid branch evolved. Why? At that time Africa split along the Great Rift Valley, that structural trench that still scars Africa from the Red Sea through lakes Tanganyika.

East of that rift, a grassland emerged, distinct from the forests that still cover the Congo Basin. Why grasslands? Because far away, across the Indian Ocean, the continent of India was very slowly sliding under Asia, raising the plateau of Tibet, creating a seasonal low-pressure-zone there, and changing the weather patterns not only of India but of Africa. The Indian monsoon was established. It sucked moisture moisture-bearing winds away from East Africa and towards India. West of the Rift, moisture could still be drawn in from the Atlantic. East of the highlands, the continent dried out.

5.1 - 3.5 million years ago

Bipedal walking upright 4million years ago Australopithecus afarensis

Warming trend

On these grasslands, bipedal apes evolved. Why they stood upright isn't clear, but this was hot country, and the sun didn't bake an upright animal quite as much as it did one on all fours. To live in this climate, hominids acquired the \unique habit of sweating profusely; to help them keep cool they also lost their hairy coats. Apart from these important changes, however, these first hominids--australopithecines, were more apelike than human. There's no evidence that they regularly used tools, for example, even though some apes, such as chimpanzees, do. Nor were their brains larger than those of contemporaneous apes.

2.5 -2.3 million years ago

First tool use

Ice Age

2.4 million years ago

Brain cases expand

1.9 –1.8 million years ago

Homo habilis at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania

1.8 -1.6 million years ago

Homo erectus and Acheulean tools.
Migrations from Africa 1.9 M to 50Kya

Homo erectus lived for more than a million years and, unlike the australopithecines, diffused far beyond Africa. Erectus finds from Java, for example, have been dated to about 1.8 million years ago, from the Caucasus to about 1.7 million years ago, from North China to about 1.3 million years ago, and from Europe to about 750,000 years ago.

How did they get there? In a time of lower sea levels, Homo erectus had diffused into Asia through a now-flooded land passage at the southern end of the Red Sea (the Bab al Mandeb, in Arabic literally the "gate of tears"). Mountains blocked the route north and west into Europe, so Europe may have been settled by backtracking across central Asia. The people who thus arrived in Europe likely became the ancestors of the Neandertals, who arose about 250,000 years ago.

1.4 million years ago

First possible evidence of fire use

600 -100,000

Homo heidlebergensis. Big brains, large range.
Speech possible This is a transition from homo erectus to archaic human

Half a million years ago, the jump was made to Homo sapiens, first in archaic forms like Neandertal Man, then about 150,000 years ago in modern forms, indistinguishable from ourselves. There are experts (Milford Wolpoff) who believe in a "multiregional hypothesis," according to which Homo sapiens emerged separately in several parts of the Old World from erectus stocks, but the more popular theory today ( Chris Stringer) is that Homo sapiens emerged once, in Africa, then radiated outward about 100,000 years ago to the Middle East and beyond. The history of the discovery of all these fossils is a great detective story and it is still going on. Its hard to find two experts who agree.

We could venture into the controversy surrounding the idea of human races. There is more genetic variation between members of a given race than there is between members of different races, and anthropology repudiate the concept of race as a false one. Yet the idea of race, resting ultimately on skin color, continues to be rooted extremely deeply in many societies, often with tragic consequences. I'm not going to dwell either on deep history or on controversies.

460,000

Evidence of Fire in China and in France

400,000

Spears in Germany

800-230,000

Oldest Art. Berekhat Ram (Israel)female figurine,

300- 30Kya

Neanderthals in Europe, Levant. Modern hyoid (throat) bone (speech>?100-50Kya) larger brains than Homo sapiens.

Speech. The most vital tool for the transmission of culture in the anthropological sense is language. We know next to nothing about language origins. Some people like to stress biology here. This leads to speculation that language developed with the human hand, its elegant coordination, and the brainpower that directs it. Others talk about the lowering of the voice box, which facilitates production of a wide variety of sounds (at the expense of leaving us the only mammal that can't drink and breathe simultaneously). Others point to the hypoglossal canal, a hole in the base of the skull through which nerve fibers lead to the tongue: the enlargement of that canal in Homo erectus suggests that delicate control of tongue movement goes back a long way. speech ?

150,000

Stone scrapers in abundance (implies clothing)

Riss glaciation
180-130,000

100,000 - present

Homo Sapiens

There's good evidence, from a cave at a place called Shkul, of this species living 100,000 years ago in what is now Israel. It had probably reached this point by diffusing across North Africa toward the Mediterranean at a time when the Sahara was not particularly dry, one of many interglacial periods during the last million years. Puzzlingly, these modern sapiens seem to have co-existed with Neandertal populations, and to have done so for perhaps 50,000 years. They then died out not by being replaced but appear to have intermarried with homo sapiens

100,000

Hafting of stone points on to handles with adhesives

75,000

Neanderthal burials - burned cave bear skulls 70K. w/ goat horns facing down 60K, covered in flowers on pine needles

Würm glaciation

70-12Kya

60,000

Direct evidence of shelter in France

60 -40,000

Humans in Australia. Boats inferred

Starting perhaps 50,000 years ago, modern sapiens spread east across the Asian rim to Southeast Asia and, by boats, to Australia. There's not much evidence left of this spread, though some recent finds in East Timor have been dated to 35,000 years ago. You wouldn't expect much evidence to survive, however, because most settlement would have been on the coast at a time of extensive glaciation. Sea level at that time had dropped perhaps 600 feet, so campsites of the time would today be deep under water. This eustatic change made it possible, however, for early modern sapiens to walk not only across the Red Sea but also from the Malay Peninsula to Sumatra and Java. Australia is a different story, because it is separated from the East Indies by some water. It's clear that people have been in Australia for 35,000 years, so boats must be an old technology. Once in Australia, people could walk to New Guinea and Tasmania, though boats were needed to get to more distant islands like New Zealand. 

50,000

Beads in Africa, Human

Creative explosion

45,000

Oldest musical instrument 80 - 40,000
– Neanderthal bone flute has diatonic scale

38 -33,000

Beads in Europe, pierce teeth necklaces
Human or Neanderthal?

44-33,000

Homo Sapiens (Cro-Magnon arrive in Europe

There was diffusion west, too, bringing people as much as 45,000 years ago to Europe, where they are familiarly known as the Cro-Magnons. (That name comes from a rock ledge near the French village of Les Eyzies, in the Dordogne Valley, where ancient bones were unearthed during railway construction in 1868.) Settlement curved northeasterly to Russia, with its wealth of meat in the form of mammoths. Why so late to Europe? The climate was severe, requiring specialized tools, such as needles to sew clothing. Once again, land bridges were important, both at the Bosporus and the English Channel. But don't imagine that there was only one flow north into Europe. Genetic studies suggest that about five percent of the European population dates back to a pioneer wave of settlement that took place about 45,000 years ago. About 80% of the population dates back to migrations occurring 20-30,000 years ago. Another ten percent dates from still later migrations.

30,000

Cave paintings in France. Stalactites and stalagmites were “played” as musical instruments

30 – 12,000

“Venus“ figurines proliferate Europe-Siberia

~30Kya Neandertal disappeared somewhat mysteriously, perhaps because they were less adaptable or competitive than Homo sapiens.

26,000

(lots of) bone awls (needles for sewing cloth)

25,000

Cro-Magnon carved antler lunar calendar SW France

22,000

Rock art in Australia some claims to 40,000 BCE

20,000

First settlement (Humans) in Siberia recent claim of 35Kya

Max ice age 18K

The most famous of the land bridges was the one across the Bering Strait, crossed by people drifting northeasterly from Siberia. It's not clear whether they came from the west or the south or both, but the idea of the crossing itself is old. It goes back to Jose de Acosta, who proposed (in 1589!) that Siberia was the source of the American Indian populations. In 1932, fluted points were found near Clovis, New Mexico>, the conventional wisdom among archaeologists has been that the Americas were settled about 13,000 years ago, when a gap opened in Canada between the great ice sheet that had spread west from Hudson Bay and the smaller glaciers descending the eastern slope of the Rockies. It suddenly became possible for "Clovis Hunters" to stream through the gap and spread quickly over the Western Hemisphere.

Lately, this picture has been called into question. First, there is wide agreement that a site called Monte Verde in southern Chile was settled 15,000 years ago. The implication is that the settlement of the Western Hemisphere had to begin substantially before then, at a time when there was no open passage through the ice sheet. Is there an alternative route? Coastal migration has been proposed. Unfortunately, it's difficult to document this movement, because here, too, ancient campsites are now mostly under water. There are a few exceptions. Recent discoveries in Peru, which lacks a broad continental shelf, show maritime residents about 11,000 years ago, a point in favor of this alternative. Added support comes from a skeleton, dated to 13,000 years ago, from the Channel Islands off the southern California coast.

In 1959, the partial skeletal remains of an ancient woman estimated to be 10,000 years old were unearthed in Arlington Springs on Santa Rosa Island, one of the eight Channel Islands off the southern California coast. They were discovered by Phil C. Orr, curator of anthropology and natural history at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The remains of the so-called Arlington Springs woman were recently reanalyzed by the latest radiocarbon dating techniques and were found to be approximately 13,000 years old. The new date makes her remains older than any other known human skeleton found so far in North America.

The astonishing thing, in any case, is that modern people by 10,000 years ago had occupied just about the entire modern ecumene, or inhabited world. Only some islands and very high latitudes remained unoccupied. The islands of the Mediterranean and Caribbean were occupied perhaps 4,000 years ago. The Arctic came later still, although if recent claims are sustained there may have been settlers in at least the European part of Arctic Russia as long as 35,000 years ago. (These earliest settlers in the Arctic may have been Neandertals.) Last of all was Polynesia, whose settlement required not only advanced navigation skills but also the possession of domesticated plants that could be grown to provide a food supply. It seems that Polynesia was finally settled by people from Southeast Asia reaching Fiji around 1500BC, the Marquesas around 500 B.C. They sailed northeastward to Hawaii around 300 AD and southwestward to New Zealand around 100 AD

I want to return to Language for a moment. Is there an original human language? If so, we know nothing about it. We do know of at least 5,000 different languages, many of which can be grouped into families derived from a common language – like Indoeuropean. There is a theory proposed by Joseph Greenberg that claims all but a handful of these languages can be traced back to a few superfamilies including Euroasiatic, four African groups (Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan, and Niger-Kordofanian), and a single Amerindian group, but such groupings are highly controversial.

Once we learned to talk, what did we talk about? Part of the answer must be that we talked about technology and ways to do things better. We think here of tools, whose evolution has been the stuff of prehistory for a long time, not least because rocks are durable. By now there's a good record of increasingly sophisticated tool use, including bows, arrows, spears. These were the tools of the Clovis Hunters, who ranged over North America 10,000 years ago and tackled mammoths, presumably with as much aplomb as pygmies, at four feet nine, hunt elephants today.

The downside of this focus on tools is that it plays into our contemporary predisposition to place excessive emphasis on technology. It's worth remembering that the highest paid people in our society include those who bounce balls and sing or act on-screen. We value non-material culture. The surviving evidence of non-material culture in prehistory, alas, is pretty fragmentary. There are those famous sculptures known as "venuses," traditionally but speculatively treated as fertility objects. There are burials, hinting at some concern with the afterlife. Spectacularly, there is cave art, found mostly in Spain and southwestern France. When first found, at Altamira in 1879, these paintings were dismissed as a hoax. How could there be bison in Spain? What's more striking now is the vitality of the paintings. No still-lifes here. Why not? We'll quickly land squarely in unrestrained speculation, but these paintings probably went a long way past decorative art and touched on the deepest beliefs of their painters.

16,000

1st map, bone, Ukraine show area around village

Rapid warming 15K

13,000

First evidence of baskets      End of last Ice Age

12-10,000

First domestication of plants and animals. Fertile Crescent ~12,000 BCE; Mexico ~11,000 BCE, China ~10,000 BCE, S America ~9,000 BCE, N America & Sub-Saharan Africa~6,000 BCE.

Agricultural Revolution

9,000

First pottery

10 – 8.5,000

Çatal Hüyük and Jericho first cities

First Civilization

6,000

Written language Sumerian Cuneiform but tokens were earlier

5,000

Iceman

4,000

Domestication of Horse, Diffusion of IndoEuropean Language from Caucasus