How do we know? Fossils from the Homo erectus family have been found not just all over Africa, but also in Europe and Asia. The first skull and bones were found by Eugène Dubois far away in Asia. Eugène Dubois (1858-1940) was a Dutchman who wanted to search for the missing link between apes and man. But where?
First he explains that Apes in Africa broke into several populations: Gorillas, Chimps, and then us Humans. The first human ancestor to spread beyond Africa was the Homo erectus. It was found with fossils discovered in the Java Islands in Southeast Asia (known as the Java man). Half a million years ago Homo erectus skeletons became enlarged, rounder, and less angular. Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens and had dramatically smaller brains than us.
The leading hypothesis concerning how our species emerged is the “Out of Africa Hypothesis’. This hypothesis suggests that all modern humans are descendants of a few ancestors that began 250,000 years ago. With this statement, it also says that humans emerged from Africa and lived there for the longest time before some decided to migrate. 2. The relationship between human foragers and their environment was very weak.
1) Creativity: Per Anthropology and research proves that sophisticated works of art first appeared in the fossil record about 50,000 years ago, at the time that modern’s humans first appeared. No other species of animal, including the apes, are able to create and understand images of art and drawing. 2) Consciousness: Human consciousness is a mystery despite decades of effort by philosophers and neurophysiologists; no one has been able to come up with a remotely plausible explanation of ‘Why’ this happens and ‘How’? 3) Personality: Another thing that makes humans unique is personality. According to Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University: "We have no idea how our brains make us who we are.
To better understand our history of evolution we will have to go back three point two million years ago where one of the first species of upright walking apes or hominids were discovered. Lucy, a female Australopithecus afarencis is well known for being part of the earliest species of hominids and was discovered containing forty-seven out of two hundred six bones in a full skeleton. During Lucy’s time the Earth’s plates were shifting causing the environment and climate to change. The rift valleys were forming and the rain forests were dying. In this new environment they found it more efficient to move about on two legs.
How might Africa's destiny have been different if we didn't sell off our gold, salt, and human resources? Achiba: We have no way of knowing. What sense does it make to dwell on the past? Mogdishu: The point is, that we are has-beens. Timbuktu, Egypt, Zimbabwe, were once great lands.
His theory states that the continents were once one and have drifted apart. Wegener named this land mass “Pangaea”, which translates “All Lands” Then he gathered evidence from around the world from landforms, fossils, and climate. He then gathered his evidence and put it in a book titled “The Origin of Continents and Oceans” which was published in 1915. But Wegener’s theory was rejected because he could not provide evidence on the force that moved the continents. One piece of evidence from an ice age shows us that continental drift actually happened.
History Of Africa Fifty years ago, Louis L. Snyder wrote in The Idea of Racialism, that any “racial differences that have been established thus far are so much dependent on outer circumstances that no proofs can be stated for the existence of innate or inborn racial differences” (p. 31). His idea was, at least in the popular imagination, well ahead of its time. Even some subsequent considerations of human origins in Africa have seemed to argue against his assertion. You initially had a chance to study his views when we considered Unit One. Now you should compare them to the summary of more recent research concerning the earliest history of Africa in chapter 2 of AiWH.
His main evidence was the continents appear to have a jigsaw like fit, the west coast of Africa and South America have the same pattern of rock layers and have the same plant and animal fossils; some of these animals are only found in those parts of the world and their fossils show they could not swim. Although it had been noted that the shapes of the continents seemed to fit together Wenger died in 1930 and his ideas had still not been accepted. This was because there was no explanation for how the continents moved and because he was not a geologist. In the 1950s and years later geologists began to consider the theory of continental drift due to fossil records from separate continents showing the same species and mineral specimens along the same break lines of the continents. His ideas were not fully accepted until the 1960s when the Atlantic Ocean floor was surveyed in detail and the mid Atlantic ridge was discovered.
Geography is unfair I agree with Ian Morris' idea that geography is the ultimate decisive power of human history. At the beginning of human history, the earliest man, homo sapiens, evolved in Africa between 200,000, then spread across the world in the last 60,000 years. This dispersal made humanity’s genes different, but some deeper parts of body did not change a lot (such as head shape or lactose tolerance). The western culture and eastern culture were not that big of a difference before the sixth century BC. Many western and eastern sages wrestled with much the same questions about life and society.