Human Cultural Evolution

Homo sapiens first appeared around 200,000 years ago, emerging from the savannas somewhere in Africa. For 150,000 years we behaved much like intelligent great apes; making rudimentary tools, using fire and living in social groups. 

The Great Leap Forward is a term coined by paleo anthropologists (scientists who study the lives of ancient people) to describe the relative sudden explosion of new knowledge and behavior that appeared in the human race some 50,000 years ago. 

However something happened around 50,000 years ago that led to the development of human culture that set us apart from every other species on earth and got us to where we are today. 

One change in behavior was the development of sophisticated group hunting techniques and the advancement of tool technology. Suddenly humans started producing tools made out of shells, antlers and bones and combining items to make axes and spears.

Humans also started using group hunting techniques like pit traps and herding large animals off cliffs, providing the group with much more food than previously able. 

With these new advanced tools humans started to get creative. People started to develop more complex art pieces, humans began to wear the fur of animals in a more sophisticated manner, adding buttons and shaping the clothes to suit different purposes and we began to bury our dead and perform rituals once they passed.

A little known fact is that around 70,000 Homo sapiens (that’s us) were on the brink of extinction. There were as little as 2,000 of our species left. However numbers grew and during the Great Leap Forward we began to move. Humans proved to be a highly adaptive species and managed to settle in many different environments from quite early on.

One of the most impressive migrations was that of the Australian Aboriginals who were one of the first populations to leave Africa and ended up in Australia managing huge ocean crossings. They arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago and remain the longest continuous culture in the world.

The Earth’s climate has always had periods of instability. Climate has played a large role in both our physical and cultural evolution. 

Our species has lived through long dry periods as well as times where most of Europe and North America were covered in glaciers (although humans didn’t live on these glaciers). Humans have proved to be a highly adaptive species, able to live in almost any type of environment. 

Scientists can study rock profiles and ice cores to learn what the climate was like in either a particular area or even from an Earth wide perspective.The climate history is preserved within layers of sediment that slowly accumulate on the bottom of lakes and oceans. 

Once scientists discover how long it takes for a layer to form they can make predictions on the time period they are looking at, and back that prediction up with carbon dating. 

The same occurs in glaciers and scientists can study trapped gas bubbles in the different bands to discover what the gas composition of the atmosphere was like at varying times. 

Some paleoanthropologists have been studying whether climate change led to Homo sapiens ancestor evolving from walking on four limbs to walking on two. At the time bipedalism (walking upright) appeared seems to coincide with a massive change in climate, leaving fewer trees to live in and a more complex environment to navigate.

Paleoanthropologists are studying whether climate change is the reason behind why Homo sapiens and our close relative the Neanderthals left Africa. Humans appeared to have left Africa at a time of climate uncertainty although this finding is intensely debated.

A 2014 study suggests that the advancement of tool technology occurred due to variation in climate. Long term drought could have forced early humans to become more creative in order to survive, leading to the development of more specialized tools. 

Out of seven humanoid species that existed on Earth only Homo sapiens remain. The answer as to why we survived when our relatives vanished could lie in the inability to cope with ongoing climate change. 

Neanderthals for example appears to have migrated during times of climate instability but never developed specialized tools which may have given them a better chance of adapting to more environments.

Art is an interesting behaviour. It does nothing to help the survival of a species as a whole but it has been an important part of human expression for at least 300,000 years. 

The oldest expression of art discovered so far are the Bhimbetka Cupules. Exactly how old these engravings are is widely debated but it is generally agreed they are at least 290,000 years old and could possibly be up to 700,000 years old. 

Cave paintings and engraving has been used ever since to depict scenes of importance and is a vital tool in learning about how different cultures lived.

The oldest known undisputed sculpture made by humans is the Venus of Hohle Fels, believed to be over 40,000 years old.

Around the time writing was developed the complexity of the art produced changed dramatically.

Pieces found from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome were incredibly complex and detailed and provides archaeologists with lots of information about what these cultures wore, ate and how they behaved.

During medieval times art was almost strictly an expression of religion. The Renaissance (meaning renewed interest in something) in the 14th century saw artists take inspiration from other sources, a trend which continues today.

The development of agriculture is arguably one of the most significant developments in human evolution. Agriculture appeared at around the same time in many different parts of the world (around 9,000 years ago), with each population seemingly without a way to communicate with the other.

Evidence shows that the area around Iraq and Syria started farming around 12,000 years ago using newly domesticated animals such as pigs (pigs are believed to be the first animal to be domesticated), sheep and goats. They also planted fig trees, wheat and barley.

Egyptians were one of the first populations to practice agriculture on a large scale, growing wheat, barley and using domesticated animals. 

The Chinese started farming millet and rice around 9,000 years ago.

Australian Aboriginals developed ‘firestick farming’ a method where the environment was maintained with the deliberate use of fire.

As the Chinese were growing rice people in South America developed maize and began growing a wide variety of food such as tomatoes, beans, squash and coca. Turkey was also domesticated for agricultural use.

Living in social groups seems to be a key factor in Homo sapiens ability to survive in different environments. However many other species live in groups, what makes humans so different?

Some paleoanthropologists theorize that newborns hold the key to how Homo sapiens evolved socially. A human newborn is a very helpless creature and no other species exerts  more time and effort into raising children than Homo sapiens.

It also takes an incredibly long time for a human baby to grow into a fully functioning adult. This long term care can only be accomplished with the help of others. Living in larger groups also ensured that there was safety in numbers from animals that would hunt humans.

While some in the tribe look after newborns, children and elderly others need to hunt and bring back food for all. In order to do that, hunters needed to collect a large amount of food meaning they needed to work together in order to hunt large animals. 

Evidence suggests that the control of fire has played a huge role in human evolution. Cooking meat releases more calories (which brains love) and allowed humans to live in colder environments more comfortably. Gathering together at a fire at night gave lots of opportunity to form close bonds with one another and develop early storytelling culture.

During times where people were either waiting for hunters, or after eating people developed ways to occupy themselves while staying in their group. This was another chance to form bonds and communicate with each other to develop new technology. 

With increasing globalization and the ease at which humans can move and interact with each other has led many to argue that humans will no longer evolve.

Certainly evolution as Charles Darwin describes it ‘survival of the fittest’ has been made relatively redundant with the advancement of modern medicine. However some scientists have been trying to gather data to predict what may happen to the human race in the future.

Many scientists argue that evolution (for humans) is dead. Evolution occurs when a small mutation which benefits that individual in some way is slowly passed down in an isolated population over generations and becomes the norm. 

Because humans are increasingly mobile, cross breed and with the intervention of medicine it is far less likely that these genes will carry through. So humans may look like a more generic version of what we have today (due to generational cross breeding among all races)

With the advancement of genetic technology humans could look radically different in the future. Being able to turn off certain genes to prevent diseases could be a possibility but also selecting on what is seen to be desirable traits could transform how humans look. 

An extreme theory is that human consciousness can be downloaded into a computer - and scientists are beginning to try and work out how to do it (and if we can do it!) Humans may not need a body at all, with our consciousness inside a computer they could have a machine as a body.

The fate of the human race could rest on whether we can leave Earth and colonize other planets. After generations of living in a totally different environment with different gravity, atmospheric and radiation levels the human race could evolve to look quite different indeed.