Rise of Humans

How did we go from ancient apes to the dominant species on Earth? The story of human evolution is one of survival, adaptation, and extinction - stretching back 7 million years. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Henry Gee to unravel the complex origins of humanity. From the first bipedal hominins to the evolutionary leaps that set Homo sapiens apart, together they explore why humans evolved from long-armed tree dwellers to upright walkers and discuss the the advantages that bipedalism gave our ancestors over other species. More from Henry Gee: The Origins of Life on Earth: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Rb4OcjbmsjIHpFemJ7mmO Feathered Dinosaurs: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05wbG2dMp174D10gP30kIj More on this topic: Homo Erectus: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3MjgWtiENDpVXc5qv77oTy Human Evolution: Dragon Man: https://open.spotify.com/episode/128XsUffcThVirTghas7OA Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:34Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:15Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:57Tristan Hughes?

  It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today, we're covering the rise of humans. Yep, that's right, human evolution. It's a story that stretches back some seven million years, one that begins with ancient apes and ends with us, with many different species of early humans emerging and disappearing in between. The story of human evolution is one still shrouded in mystery. Not only is the fossil record for early humans extremely limited, but so much of it is still debated, including the all-important question: why did early humans, or hominins, why did they become bipedal? How did they evolve from long-armed tree dwellers to two-legged runners?

• 3:42Tristan Hughes?

  These radical changes in bodily structure that have occurred over millions of years. Joining me to talk through this evolution story is a fan favorite of the podcast, Dr. Henry G. Henry has been on the podcast before to talk about both the origins of life on Earth and the dinosaurs. Quite a few of you have been clamoring for us to have him back on the show, and I'm delighted to announce his return to talk about the fascinating story of the rise of humans.

• 4:13Tristan Hughes?

  Henry, welcome back to the podcast. It has been too long.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Thank you very much Tristan.

• 4:18Tristan Hughes?

  We've done top five dinosaurs, we've done the wonderful story of the origins of life on earth. And this feels like another story, the rise of humanity. And Henry, this is a story we need to start with. It takes us back more than five, six, seven, eight million years. There's a lot of history and ancient history and prehistory to cover here.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Yep, that's right. The human history, well, ancient history has a very, very long run up. I mean, recorded history is barely 5,000 years, but this one goes into 98% of human history, which has no written record and we just pick up from fossils and other scraps of information that we can tell from rock.

• 5:00Tristan Hughes?

  And to tell the story of human evolution, as I said, we're going to be covering several million years of history. You mentioned fossils. How rich a record do you have for studying human evolution? Do you have many examples of fossils from millions of years ago surviving?

• 5:17Speaker 03

  No, that's the thing about human evolution. The fossils are very uncommon generally, except in certain places. You can count the number of fossils on the fingers of one hand, but the amount of fossils that tell you anything about human origins, you can count on the fingers of one thumb. They are very, very, very tiny, very scarce, mostly teeth like mammals generally. But the thing is that humans in the very broadest sense, meaning all our ancestry going back to apes, were always very rare in the landscape. I remember going to East Africa to join an expedition looking for fossil humans living 3.3 million years ago in Kenya.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  And fossils of alligators, catfish, turtles were just so common.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  That you didn't bother collecting them. Occasionally you would find, you know, a little skull of a fossil pig or a bit of a fossil baboon or a bit of an antelope. But in the entire field season, the number of fossil human remains were little bits of teeth and jaws that you could fit into a, a very small biscuit tin. And that was after months of prospecting. And that was a good year. I mean, it's very rare to find a, a whole skull or, or even a whole skeleton. I mean, these are red letter day.

• 6:37Tristan Hughes?

  So we are going to be covering several different early human species as this chat goes on. But with that kind of sparsity of surviving evidence, do we think that there were probably many other species on the human line that we just don't know about?

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely, for sure. Not only were there likely to be more, but the thing about fossils is fossils is where you find them and they tend to be more common in some places than others. So people tend to look in the places where they already know fossils tend to be common. So the caves of South Africa have always had top billing. The rift valley of East Africa has been a plentiful source. And people have been looking in other places and finding new things in Southeast Asia, for example. And there are quite a lot of very mysterious fossils from China. And places like India have hardly been explored because maybe they're at the relevant rocks are not found.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  West Africa, it looks likely to be a focus of renewed interest. There are all sorts of interest in stone tools. But one of the problems with West Africa, it is covered in forests, which is very untidy for paleontologists who, who like to look at desert where the rocks are more exposed. So there are all sorts of places that people are beginning to look. And West Africa has some very interesting archaeology, that is their stone tools going back and there are beginning to be some surprising results coming out of there. But the biggest surprises of the past 25 years have been in Southeast Asia, where there were a lot of limestone caves, huge numbers of limestone caves that are barely explored. And there is also.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Now we can look at the whole genome, the whole DNA of modern people, but also the whole DNA of some extinct species such as Neanderthals and another species called the Denisovans. We know more about these species from their DNA. And also we find the DNA, some of the DNA is incorporated into the genes of modern people such as you and me. And Neanderthals particularly, I think, looking at me, I probably have more than you do. Um, uh, but there are some species, human species, which are only known from bits of DNA in the genomes of living people. It's a bit like identifying Cheshire cats from their smiles.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  And so there are more. Whether we'll discover more is an open question, but there will be more discoveries. They do tend to happen rather unexpectedly and not very often.

• 9:23Tristan Hughes?

  Right, Henry, now let's delve into the story. We are sitting comfortably. When does the human story begin? We go back to apes, I'm presuming.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Yes, 10 million years ago, cast your mind back, if you will, to the earth 10 million years ago. There were more forests on the earth and we're talking about what we used to call the Old World, Eurasia and Africa. And there were a lot of apes. There were quite a few apes in Europe and in Africa and in in Asia. But some of these were probably more closely related to gorillas and orangutans than to humans. But after that period, the forests tend to thin out rather. There was a slow, in fact, since then, there's been a generally slow cooling of the earth towards the Ice Ages.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  And in the tropics, the cooling is manifested as forests dying out to be replaced by a more mixed habitat of what you might call savanna or parkland with grasslands and a few trees here and there. And the number of apes diminished and monkeys became more prevalent. So there were a few apes hanging on, but after about ten, nine million years, the fossil record of apes almost disappears completely. And so between, until the turn of this century, there was essentially no record of apes or humans or human and possible human relatives between

• 10:58Speaker 03

  ten and five million years ago, none, none at all. And then suddenly, in just after the two thousand, an entire skull drops right into the middle. It was about seven million years ago, and this came from Chad in Central Africa, which is, hadn't been very well explored. And it was an entire skull of a creature called Sahelanthropus chadensis.

• 11:20Tristan Hughes?

  Sahelanthropus.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  And it's an unbelievably hard place to work. I mean, it really does look like a blasted desert. And people, I've seen people come, I haven't been there, but I have seen people who've come direct to France, because it was a French Chad joint expedition. I've seen people come back to France directly from Chad without washing, and they look yellow, they look completely sandblasted. So, but Sahelanthropus chadensis was a whole skull, and also there was a couple of elbow joints and a bit of a leg bone that was described later. And these finds are, they haven't been directly dated, but looking at the,

• 12:02Speaker 03

  there are lots of other animals found there. And looking at the complexion of the fauna, you can tell that it's about seven million years old. But the interesting thing about Sahelanthropus is it looks like an ape, the skull's about the same size as a chimpanzee, but the hole in the base of the skull, where the spinal cord goes in, is right in the middle at the bottom, or almost, rather than at the back. And that's crucial because a skull that balances on the spinal cord that's on the bottom, it comes from an animal that's a biped, it walks on two legs. If the hole that the spinal cord goes in is at the back of the skull, that suggests that the animal is like your sheep or your cat or dog.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  I have a sheep skull here.

• 12:49Tristan Hughes?

  This is okay, Henry is standing up to fetch the sheep skull, which is right above his office setup.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Here is a skull I prepared earlier. This is a sheep skull I found when I was nine. And if you look, that's the hole where the spinal cord would go in.

• 13:03Tristan Hughes?

  And it's right at the back of the head.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  It's right at the back. It's not, so if you look at the base of the skull, there's the, the hole, it's called the foramen magnum, which is Latin for big hole. So it's just called a big hole where the spinal cord goes in. In hominins, that is members of the human family, that hole is moved much further to the centre. So the skull would balance on top. And that indicates the one thing that suggests that the owner of this skull was a hominin. And that means a member of the lineage that led to humans as distinct from our closest relatives chimpanzees. And so Sahelanthopus,

• 13:46Speaker 03

  that was pretty much the only thing that showed that Sahelanthopus was a hominin. It looked very ape-like in every other way. But tha- that crucial feature marked it out as closer to living. It's not an ancestor, it's not a missing link. What it means that it is closer to modern humans than to modern apes. So it is the first sign of something being on our lineage. A distant great uncle, let's call it.

• 14:14Tristan Hughes?

  It's amazing how like the earliest evidence you have, say seven million years ago, found in a remote corner of Chad. And even though you don't have the full body surviving or all of the legs, just from that skull and the position of the spine, you can deduce that it is different in, in its locomotion, in bipedality, which is, is, is central, isn't it, to the whole story of the rise of humans?

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, it is central. Um, one of the reasons we can tell is that no other mammal has a skull like that with the foramen magnum underneath. Bipedality certainly of that style is absolutely unique to modern humans. I mean, there were an awfully long time ago, some apes that tried to be bipedal. But they were kind of bipedal in different ways. They they were more definitely apes. But they all died out a long time ago. And there's some rather suggestive footprints that are kind of five million years old that though. Some people think are belong to bipedal creatures. Some people don't think they're footprints at all.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  And there were apes that lived much longer ago, fourteen million years or so in there's one called Aureopithecus that lived in what is now Tuscany. That might have been bipedal, but it it died out. But this particular mark of bipedality, the the hole, where the position of the hole in the skull. Is really what marks marks a hominin, something that is on the human line, as it were, in the human family.

• 15:54Tristan Hughes?

  So Sahelanthropus is almost our our starting point of examples that we're covering. And I've got in my notes that this is basically the dawn of the bipedal chimps phase.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:04Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, so so what comes next following Sahelanthropus in in the millions of years and in the story of the rise of humanity?

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Well, the hominin fossil record being very scanned, an awful lot of nothing for another two or three million years. The record picks up again about five, between five and four million years in East Africa. There is a creature called Aurorin tugenensis from Kenya. That's not known from the skull at all, but it's known from leg bones, which show a bipedal hominin. And there is another creature from Ethiopia called Ardipithecus cadaba. Which is about nearly five-ish million years ago. And slightly more recently, Ardipithecus ramidus, which is about four and a half million years old.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Ardipithecus ramidus has most of the skeleton. And that's quite interesting. I mean, it's a hominin in the it it shows. That the move to bipedality wasn't a simple, a, a simple linear thing. Australopithecus was clearly a hominin and clearly a biped, but not quite as bipedal as you or I. It was probably much better up a tree. It would have been a better climber than us. And it probably, like modern chimps and gorillas do, is they make nests in the lower branches of trees, even though they spend a lot of time on the ground. So there are some, even as late as three, three and a half million years ago,

• 17:37Speaker 03

  there are a range of different hominins, the, you know, the bipedal chimp phase. Some were more bipedal than others. There is a series of footprints at a place called Litoli in Tanzania, discovered by Mary Leakey, this was the great Louis Leakey's wife, back in the late sixties.

• 17:57Tristan Hughes?

  Did they discover the famous fossil Lucy, Mary Leakey?

• 17:59Speaker 03

  No, they didn't. That was discovered by other people in Ethiopia. But it's generally thought that the species that, that Lucy's species Australopithecus afarensis was the same species that created the footprint at Litoli.

• 18:15Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  And certainly from what we know about Lucy's anatomy, that looks perfectly reasonable. And what we can see from Lucy, because we have a lot of skeleton of Lucy, what we see from Lucy and these footprints is that these creatures walked as bipedally as you or I. But there are other footprints at Litoli. What happened in Litoli was three and a half million years ago, there was a volcanic eruption, as there often are in the, in the Rift Valley. And it rained some ash all over the landscape. And then there was actual rain, so the ash became kind of a bit gloopy and muddy. And everything walked all over it. It looked like the Victoria Station at Rush Hour. There was footprints of all sorts of creatures all over it.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  So there are antelopes and pigs. And then there's this famous line of Australopithecus afarensis footprint. But there were also some footprints of another creature. Mary Leakey originally thought it might have been a bear because bears can walk upright. But this was really just a blind supposition because, you know, fossils of bears are extremely rare. But it's now thought that this was a different kind of hominin. There's a foot, a fossil foot that was found in Ethiopia that looked kind of hominin, but it had a much more divergent big toe. So it's, in other words, its big toe was more like a thumb.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  And the footprints made by this mystery, this mystery hominin, might have been made by, by that kind of hominin. So that three and a half million years ago, there were bipedal hominins, but some were more bipedal than others. Lucy, Australopithecus aflorentis, walked just like you or I, but probably climbed trees as well. There's some research to show, some forensic pathology to show that Lucy died when she fell out of a tree. So she's got fractures consistent with falling out of a tree. I mean, some people don't believe this, but it's a nice story. So the bipedal chimp phase had a mixture of different species, some of which were better at climbing than others.

• 20:26Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, Henry, it's interesting because obviously we've started with Sahhalanthropus and then covered Ardipithecus and then Australopithecus, which feel like the big names you need to cover in that early phase, that bipedal chimp phase. And yet we've gone from seven million to three million years or three point five million years. So that's almost half the whole story of human evolution that we know about. And yet the evidence that we have surviving i- is quite rare, only know a handful of different species. Just for example, that big gap between Sahhalanthropus and Ardipithecus that you highlighted between seven and four million years ago. That's two to three million years in between that the evidence is lacking.

• 21:07Tristan Hughes?

  And it'd be fascinating to know, kind of, hopefully in the future, more evidence will emerge, learning a bit about that whole evolutionary step, diversity of early bipedal chimp phase and what could come in the future there.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Well, you know, the thing about paleontology is you must expect the unexpected, so who knows what would come. But I would imagine that when people start looking, if they find. Deposits of that of a similar age, they will find a greater variety of the bipedal chimp kind of thing until about two and a half million years ago, when things kind of changed a bit.

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• 23:53Tristan Hughes?

  And so we get to Australopithecus, and I know with Australopithecus, there are various almost subspecies of Australopithecus found all across Africa. We're still centred in Africa at this moment in time. But would you argue, are they the most successful in the bipedal chimp phase? Are they the most bipedal of them all too?

• 24:13Speaker 03

  It's very hard to say, because there were quite a few species of Australopithecus. The first one described, Australopithecus africanus, was described, you know, exactly 100 years ago, and that came from South Africa. So that was Australopithecus africanus, and so the paleoanthropology world is celebrating that centenary this year. But there were a number of different species, and whether they were all actually different species or not is a matter of very refined argument. But that genus Australopithecus seems to have been pretty successful throughout Africa. There is another one indeed from Chad, Australopithecus

• 24:58Speaker 03

  bar el ghazali, which is almost, it's almost indistinguishable actually from afferensis. And there's another one in, there's some more in Ethiopia, Australopithecus, but there were some later ones, and there were some slightly different ones. So there were quite a few of them. Now, whether there'll be a shakedown, and they'll all be the same species or not, or whether there'll be more species, it's very hard to say. But certainly, as much as anyone has looked, between about five and two and a half million years ago, the Australopithecus model of hominin, which was basically a bipedal chimp, was the kind of hominin that existed on the earth.

• 25:38Tristan Hughes?

  And it's also interesting that, yeah, so you've got Anamensis, Sardiba, Africana, as you mentioned, all these different types of Australopithecus, just imagining them walking around, strutting their stuff, maybe the people who left those, those footprints at Laitoli, as you mentioned, those original footprints found by Mary Leakey and her team. If it seems that these bipedal chimps, by the time we get to Australopithecus, they're becoming more capable of being bipedal and they're almost walking like we would do, at least at some stages. The big question is why? Why do you think these early hominins, they start becoming more and more bipedal?

• 26:16Speaker 03

  It's a big question. I mean, the, the question is, why did bipedality happen in the first place? It's a really unlikely form of locomotion. And in my new book, which I wanted to call demure, myantoneus, the Taylor Swift way, but the publishers insisted I called it the decline and fall of the human empire. I have a whole chapter on bipedality and why it was one of the worst things that could ever have happened to, to us. Traditionally, explanations for bipedality, why we got up and stood on two legs, have been of a kind of after the fact reasoning. In other words, we got up on our hind legs to free our hands

• 26:57Speaker 03

  so we could make tools or carry babies or look over the long grass or show off our tender genitalia to prospective mates or any other, any other idea you can, you can come up with. But these don't actually explain the existence of bipedality in the sense that bipedality is far more than getting up on your hind legs. Various animals can do this, but only for a short time because it's very tiring. And to be bipedal as a matter of course, requires a complete re-engineering of the entire

• 27:37Speaker 03

  body, from the back of the skull, the curvature of the spine, the internal organs, the valves in the veins in our legs, how our feet are constructed, and all sorts of other things. And bipedality is unbelievably maladaptive. The reason is that for most of the history of backboned animals, our backbone was evolved about half a billion years ago in an aquatic ancestor. And basically, it's a kind of clothesline, it's a kind of clothesline on which the internal organs are hung. So it's basically a beam that's held horizontally in tension.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  And that's great, but bipeds in the past that were successful, such as dinosaurs, even though they were bipeds, they still held their backbone horizontally. And they were bipeds because they had a very long tail as a kind of cantilever to the trunk. And that allowed them to be bipedal. But humans don't have tails, so we have to do it the hard way. We have to stand the whole body up, change the backbone so it's held vertically in compression. Now, because of this, bad backs are the single most important cause of absenteeism in humans. The vertical state of humans is responsible for edema in the legs, piles, hernias, blue

• 29:04Speaker 03

  ear in babies, all sorts of musculoskeletal problems are caused by bipedalism. It was a very bad thing. So how did it evolve? Well, no one knows, but the current frontrunner, as it were, is, well, it probably evolved when we were mostly living in trees. Now, apes and monkeys have a variety of way of getting around in trees, and one of them is kind of a kind of clambering or climbing mode of locomotion, where it's called an orthobrade posture, where the creatures, the creatures basically are climbing in a vertical way among the branches. So I think bipedality is basically climbing among the branches, only without the branches.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  And that's the, that's the nearest anyone can get to it. All the other things that have been ascribed to bipedality as an advantage, such as the aquatic ape theory, wading in water, or carrying babies, or making tools. These don't require bipedality to happen. There are lots and lots of very successful ground living monkeys, such as baboons, that carry their babies quite well and their quadrupeds. There are monkeys such as capuchins, which are quadrupeds that make tools. They just sit on their haunches and, and do it. Meerkats can stand up and look over the grass and stand on things. So why bipedality happened? What good is it for?

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Well, it's certainly good for all these things, but it's certainly very bad in many other ways. Also, it's very disadvantageous if you break a leg. Now, everyone's seen three-legged dogs running along quite happily, but you know, a one-legged hominin, if you broke a leg, he'd be killed. You'd be eaten instantly by, by some animal. I mean, I broke an ankle in a trivial accident at home a few years ago. And I was only rehabilitated thanks to the National Health Service. Now, I was carted off in an ambulance. I will have the administration of surgeons and anesthetists and physiotherapists and a wheelchair loaned from the Red Cross and the long-suffering Mrs. G to pull me to,

• 31:16Speaker 03

  to push me around in it. And a circumstance which definitely led, although she denies it, to her going back to university to qualify as a nurse, specialising in people with learning disabilities, go figure. But without all these things, I would have died. You know, so natural selection ensured that when hominins started to be bipedal, they had to get very good at it very quickly. Otherwise, so once they started to be bipedal, there was no way back. And so that's why you get all these bipedal hominins around that time.

• 31:55Tristan Hughes?

  It's interesting, it's such a key stage in the story of evolution and thank you for explaining it there, Henry, the importance of that change in the backbone and bipedalism. So we have got to, let's say about three, 2.5 million years ago, and it feels like this is when the next overarching phase comes in, the beginning of the genus that that we belong to, the homo genus, the homo phase begins.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Yes, 2.5 million years ago, or thereabouts, was a big change in the earth climate. It suddenly begun, it began to get more, much cooler and more than it had been and more seasonal. That's when in the north and far south and in mountain ranges, the ice ages, the sequences of ice ages began to take hold and become more serious. And the result of that was, in the tropics, forests shrunk further and something opened up this tropical grassland called the savanna, which which opened up. And around that time, two new kinds of hominin appeared.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  One was called Paranthropus, which was a specialist vegetarian. Now, all hominins before that had been kind of scavengers, omnivores, like chimpanzees today, they would have ate all kinds of things, you know, honey from bees, insects, a bit of plants, nuts, seeds, fruits, maybe some other animals, chimpanzees hunt for monkeys. And so they would have eaten a bit of everything, but Paranthropus became a vegetarian specialist. It had huge teeth and crunched up fibrous nuts and roots.

• 33:32Tristan Hughes?

  It's known as the robust one, isn't it, or something like that?

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Yes, it was, they they have been called robust Australopithecines, but they're usually classed in their own genus Paranthropus, and there were several of them. And life for them started hard and just got harder and harder, and they they they became extinct about half a million years ago. The other genus was Homo, that's the genus that includes ourselves. And the first essays in the genus Homo were probably not much different from Australopithecines. In fact, some of them called Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis. There's been an argument that really these are just an other Australopithecines. And I think there's a lot of merit in that. But the first of the genus Homo that really stood apart was Homo erectus.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  And that originated in Africa over two, two million years ago. And the reason that was a different thing was it was built entirely differently. Now, all the Australopithecus and the earliest Homo, they had rather short legs and long arms compared with us. And they didn't have much of a neck, their, their head was quite, you know, stuck onto the body. And they didn't have a waist, they had kind of a bit of a pot belly. And they were good at walking about. But one thing that Homo erectus could do was run. And Homo erectus was a specialist meat eater. It was a social carnivore, much like hunting dogs, and probably behaved in the same way.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Now, a friend of mine, Dan Lieberman, and his colleague Dennis Bramble, came up with a whole scenario of long distance running as a key feature of the development of Homo. And, you know, I'm not surprised, Dan is a very keen ultra marathon runner and runs in bare feet. So, and he worked on human locomotion, so he's really invested in this. But it's not, it's the whole syndrome. One thing that Homo has that you don't have, except in other predators such as dogs, is a ligament that holds the back of the skull to the neck, so it keeps your head up even without effort. Another thing is if you have a neck and if you have a waist, you can keep running with your arms in contra-rotation to your legs.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  In other words, your left arm moves with your right leg and vice versa. And you can keep your neck pointed at where you're looking at, whether it's the finish line of the marathon or the antelope you are chasing. At the same time, humans became more hairless. I mean, humans have the same amount of hair, but it's much sparser and in between there are sweat glands that most other animals don't have. I mean, your dogs will pant if they're hot and animals such as antelopes and cheetahs and that sort of thing. They can run really fast for a short distance and then they have to stop because they become exhausted and they, the heat catches up with them.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  But humans, humans can't sprint very well compared with other animals, but humans are much better than many animals at long distance running. It's the stamina part. Yeah, it's the stamina, it's the endurance, it's the sweating, it's the hairlessness, it's the the fact that the human cost of transport, in other words, human walking is extraordinarily efficient. This is why just walking about won't lose you many calories because it's very, very efficient. Running is slightly less efficient, but humans can manage it mile after mile after mile after mile. So hunter gatherers when chasing down some antelope will, will chase it for a bit and then the antelope will stop and, and so, and

• 37:13Speaker 03

  everyone else will stop and they'll recover. And then the antelope goes on a bit and the humans chase it. But the humans are relentless and eventually the antelope will just collapse from heat exhaustion. And this is, this is, this is what, this is what happens in, in, in real life. And there's also a cooperative element because as you find in many carnivores like lions and hunting dogs, they kind of different, different individuals head them off and ambush them and, and one of them flushes it out while the other one jumps on it. This would, this would have been true for Homo erectus as well. So the human syndrome of the, the human body shape that we associate with humans today

• 37:55Speaker 03

  came with Homo erectus and it seems to have been associated with a capacity for long distance running that the earlier hominins didn't have, or at least not as well.

• 38:07Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, Henry, it's no surprise then, it's no coincidence that Homo erectus literally translates as upright man.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  That's correct, yeah.

• 38:15Tristan Hughes?

  And I remember doing an interview with John McNab a couple of years ago on Homo erectus. And he showed me a replica pelvic girdle of Homo erectus, and it's basically exactly the same as a modern human. So as you say, this was a fully bipedal early human built for running, covering long distances, which leads us very nicely into the next big question with Homo erectus, which is how far and wide does Homo erectus ultimately spread? Because we've been talking only about Africa so far in our chat.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Homo erectus is, as far as we know, the first hominin to spread out of Africa and spread all over Eurasia. There are tools from China that are over 2 million years old. There are remains of Homo erectus-like animals or hominins in Spain that are not quite as old. Now, Homo erectus would have no concept of a continent called Africa or that it was leaving it. What they were doing was following the game because the savannah spread all through Africa, all through South Western Asia and into Europe, right down into into Java. So

• 39:27Speaker 03

  they were following the savannah. So in fact, Homo erectus was first found in Java in by Eugène Dubois.

• 39:35Tristan Hughes?

  Southeast Asia, got it, yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was first thought of as a giant gibbon, Pithecanthropus. And it was only when more of the same kind were found in China that Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus, as it was, were united into Homo erectus. And they were realised to be much more close to humans. Another thing that put them fairly close to humans in certainly in those days was the was the discovery that Homo erectus used fire. Whether they just used opportunistic bits of fire and carried burning bits around, or whether they had learned to actually make fire is a moot point. So there's some very exciting evidence that I can't tell you about, about the earliest,

• 40:18Speaker 03

  the earliest occurrence of fire starting as opposed to fire usage. But if I told you that, I'd have to kill you. Um, so I can't tell you about that. But not now, not yet, next time, Henry. No, but also Homo erectus made wonderful stone tools, these teardrop shaped stone tools called hand axes, which are found all over the Eurasia and Africa. Some are small, some are big, when they're made of different kinds of rock. But that is the signature artifact of Homo erectus. And they may also have scratched scratches on tools, on shells. There are some shells from Eugene Dubois' excavations in Java that show signs of crosshatch scratching.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  They may also have been capable of some limited watercraft. Because there are remains of Homo erectus, Homo erectus, certainly their artifacts in islands, in islands, Southeast Asia, that they could not possibly have reached over land, even when there were land bridges joining them. So Homo erectus was quite inventive and widespread, but not quite the same as us. Because, you know, Alan Walker and Pat Shipman in their book, The Wisdom of Bones, which is about Homo erectus. So if we looked into the eye of one, we wouldn't see a human, we'd see a savanna predator. They were very much that. They made tools, but they made tools in a quite different way than we would.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  And, and the reason we know that is nobody knows what a hand axe is actually for. So they made hand axes in a very stereotypical way, in the same way that bees make honeycombs or birds make nests. It was a kind of intrinsic thing.

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• 43:21Tristan Hughes?

  Homo erectus is one of, if not the, most successful, I would argue, and longest-lasting of early humans, isn't it? And it's a fascinating story. If anyone wants to learn more about the story of human evolution, you start at Homo erectus because it is such an essential hominin to learn about in the, ultimately, the emergence of Homo sapiens and all of that. And I wish we could cover so many different examples, but Henry, set the scene just before the arrival of Homo sapiens onto the main stage. How many different types of early humans are there? And how diverse are they?

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, Homo erectus diversified. Well, you said earlier that, in your opinion, Homo erectus was the most successful hominin, and I would completely agree because Homo erectus was around from two and a half million, and the last ones probably died out, maybe 100,000, maybe even more recently, in Java. So, almost two and a half million years of very successful history, which is incredibly long time for a mammalian species that's generally lived for only a million years. But by that time, Homo erectus had more or less retired to a comfortable retirement home in Java, and its successors were all over Europe. And some of them were big and beefy. I mean, Homo hydalbergensis, which is probably not a real species, but a

• 44:39Speaker 03

  kind of mishmash of other ones, these were big people. There was a shin bone. Was discovered at Boxgrove in Sussex, which is about the size of a large, modern male shinbone, but really thick and beefy. I mean, these people could have played for the British Lions. I mean, they they were big people. There were some spears, wooden spears, found at Schöningen in Germany, about three hundred thousand years old. These were fence posts, and yet they were they were used as weapons. In East Asia, a marvelous skull was discovered quite recently. There's a amazing story about its discovery of Homo longi or dragon man.

• 45:19Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, yes.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  And the skull, it's only a skull in Manchuria, the skull is at least as big as a modern human. So considering that Australopithecus was only a meter so tall and with a skull of a chimp. You know, these people were big. I mean, you know, like Genesis six versus four, maybe it's Genesis four versus six. I can't remember it. There were giants on the earth in those days. But there was more. They were the hobbits. Homo erectus became marooned on islands in Southeast Asia. First, it was known in Flores, which is just to the east of Java.

• 45:50Tristan Hughes?

  Homo floresiensis.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  And in the Philippines, these creatures became very small. Because for reasons that nobody really quite understands, big creatures marooned on islands become small. And small creatures marooned on islands become big. So you have these tiny creatures, less than three feet tall, fighting off gigantic rats the size of dogs. And huge Komodo dragons and tiny and tiny elephants. And the ones in the Philippines fought tiny rhinos. And they evolved to be very small, but they still made Homo erectus-like tools only just smaller. And then there was the Neanderthals, that they first appeared about three hundred thousand years ago. And the first signs of them are in Spain.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  And they tended to be cave dwellers, and they lived in Europe and in Eurasia as far east as Siberia. And also, you know, as far south as the Middle East. But they were cave dwellers. I think that they were they were built for the rugged extremes of Northern Europe in the Ice Age. And they spent most of their time in caves and they cultivated a deep inner life. There is a remarkable circular structure in a cave in France. That was made by Neanderthals. It's a structure of broken stalactites and bare skulls. That is a circle, maybe it was the foundation of some kind of structure.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  But it was built in a part of the cave that would always have been away from sunlight, always in total darkness. And Neanderthals are known to have deliberately buried their dead. I mean, there's some, there are some early signs of some Neanderthal precursors in the so-called Pit of Bones at Atapueca in the Sierra de Atapueca in northern Spain. It's a pit of bones because they, the residents tucked their dead ones down this pit at the back of the cave. So that was the first sign of any kind of ceremony, because when animals die, they don't tend to notice the dead ones very much. Except if they're perhaps elephants or some other intelligent creature.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  But Neanderthals actually deliberately buried their dead with flowers and other grave markers, so. With flowers? Yes, yes, there's a, there's a very famous Neanderthal grave at Shannidar in what is now Iraq, where there's signs of concentrations of olive, and which suggests that they buried their dead with, with, they marked their dead with, with their funeral traditions. But some Neanderthal, some early Neanderthals looked up at the Tibetan plateau and thought, that looks like a nice place. And as they climbed, they evolved into these Neanderthal cousins, the Denisovans, which are Neander, as far as we know, nobody's found much, there's a bit of jaw and some teeth and some hand bones, but they're mostly known from their DNA, which has been extracted.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  These lived on the roof of the world, which is almost the most inhospitable place you can live, except for Antarctica. And they evolved into these creatures, the Denisovans. And we know they evolved at high altitude because after they evolved at high altitude, they came back down again and. Traces of their DNA are found in many people who live in East and Southeast Asia to this day, and a gene from Denisovans is the gene that allows modern Tibetans to breathe easily at high altitude. So all these Sherpas who go up and down Everest and don't get the credit, they all

• 49:19Speaker 03

  have these genes from Denisovans that allow them to breathe in low oxygen, so that was the Denisovans. So we had these Yetis, and we had the Troglodytes, and we had the Hobbits, and we had these beefy giants, all were the heirs of Homo erectus, and so was Homo sapiens, which originated in Africa at about the same time that Neanderthals originated in Europe.

• 49:42Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, Henry, so let's get on to now the the final chapter, almost, the arrival of Homo sapiens on to the on to the scene and interactions with all of these other early human species that it must have shared the world with for hundreds of thousands of years before ultimately becoming the last one standing.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Yes, modern humans, Homo sapiens, originated as far as we know, I mean, the dates keep being put back and back. The earliest evidence comes from Morocco, from a site called Jebel Ighoud, which has been known for a long time, and every so often more bones and skulls are dug up. And the latest news from Jebel Ighoud is that there were skulls of something that looked very like Homo sapiens 315,000 years ago or there about. There are other similar skulls from Ethiopia that look a bit like Homo sapiens, but it has to be said that these look pretty rough ingredients. They didn't look completely like modern humans, so they were they were probably no better

• 50:42Speaker 03

  or worse at living in their environment than any other human. They had to be seasoned by contact with other humans. Now, the modern view of the origin of Homo sapiens is that groups of Homo sapiens would diverge and then come together again, and then diverge again throughout Africa for a very long time, probably interbreeding with other African hominins whose existence we know very little about, except in their DNA, and also the occasional discovery of bones that are very recent in date. But look very archaic. I mean, there's a very famous skull from Iho Eluru in Nigeria that's been known for a long time. It's only twenty something thousand years old, but it

• 51:27Speaker 03

  looked very, very archaic. And there are other things like that. So there was a great deal of diversity in Africa, a huge amount of diversity. And so there were hominins interbreeding with each other to make Homo sapiens. But at the same time, Homo sapiens were starting to move out of Africa. Now, the first essays in migration in Africa were a bit of a failure. There is, there are, there's Homo sapiens found in Greece that's over two hundred thousand years ago, but it didn't last. Oh, epitome cave, this is. Yeah, in, in what is now Israel, there's the Mount Carmel massive, where Neanderthals and modern humans tended to have a kind of time share arrangement with all the caves.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  In some caves, there are Neanderthals, in some there are modern humans. And what seems to be the shocker is the modern humans lived there before the Neanderthals did, and they didn't live there that long. So what happens is, modern humans tried to get out of Africa, but the Neanderthals had everywhere else kind of locked up. So they didn't compete with them very well. And they probably just visited occasionally in warmer levels of climate. But things changed because from about a hundred thousand years ago, maybe slightly more, between a hundred and twenty ish thousand years ago and fifty thousand years ago was quite a, a warm spell in the earth's climate. And that's when modern humans

• 52:53Speaker 03

  in several waves came out of Africa. There were two possible routes. One was the, through the Sinai Peninsula, and the other was at the other end of Arabia, the Bab El Mandeb Straits, which might have been much narrower back in those days. But one shouldn't get the impression this was a kind of mosaic exodus. They all kind of decided to go at once. I mean, it was, in dribs and drabs, some were more dribs and drabs than others over a very long period. But as they went, they met the other hominins, the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and who knows other ones as well. And. A lot of the time, they made love, not war.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  So all modern humans now that do not have an exclusively African descent have about 2% Neanderthal DNA. It used to be more, but of natural selection has weeded out deleterious Neanderthal mutations. And so it's about 2%. But we can see evidence for this interbreeding, really at the sharp end, because there's a bone of a modern human, a bit of skull of a modern human, about 45,000 years old that's found in Romania, that had one Neanderthal great-grandparent. So you almost get into those hybridizations, and these hybridizations happened, you know, they weren't often, but they happened enough to leave a strong remnant in our DNA today.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  So modern humans got into Europe about 45,000 years ago and drove Neanderthals to extinction within 10,000 years. Now, why they drove them to extinction is still a matter of contention. What seems to be the most likely one is you've got to get away from the idea that this all happened all at once. It took several thousand years to happen. It took longer than recorded history to happen. What seems to have happened is that humans, modern humans, were slightly better at raising young to reproductive age than Neanderthals. Humans were slightly less inclined to inbreed than Neanderthals.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Neanderthals were very inbred. They lived in much smaller clans than modern humans. Modern humans ranged slightly further over the landscape than Neanderthals. Now, all these things at the time were probably too small to notice, but over thousands of years, these things accumulate. So it got to a point where hominins have always lived in small groups, but the only way to keep up genetic variation and stop people becoming all the same is occasionally to swap mates with other groups. And what is true in all primates, as far as we know, is that Males tend to stay with the group they were born with, but females tend to move to other groups.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  And that's true, that was true in Australopithecus. We know this from some amazing work on strontium isotopes in bones, which I won't go into. But it's also true, it's also true in humans and Neanderthals. So you need that interbreeding. Clans would often would meet, I guess, at times of festival to drink and swap stories and, and, and worship the great gods and also have marriage ceremonies and choose mate and then they would move around. But when you get to a point in Europe, when there were lots and lots and lots of modern human groups and not many Neanderthal groups, the Neanderthal groups were effectively cut off from other Neanderthal groups.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  So there, there were only two things to do, which is become extinct or interbreed with the human. So that seems to have been the case. It's, it's a similar story in the rest of the world, although not nearly so well documented. It is known that humans met Denisovans and Denisovans met Neanderthals in Eastern Asia. And the same thing's happened, that the only, the Denisovans survive today in a small percentage of DNA, mostly of people who live in Eastern and Southeastern Asia. Papua New Guinea is a very good stronghold of modern Denisovan DNA, which is, you know, who knows, it's just the lottery of life. The other little ones, like the hobbits, were probably driven to extinction by

• 57:09Speaker 03

  humans taking over their, their range, their resources. Now, it's an interesting thing that the hobbits of Flores probably disappeared at about the same time that modern humans arrived there in Flores. And I have this kind of fanciful motion that folktales of little people living in the mountains.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Are probably folk memories of previous hominins. Now, this is just me being completely fanciful, but you know, I'm, as you know, a great fan of Tolkien. So I think that all the folk tales of elves, dwarves, leprechauns, the little people that lived here before us, might have been a distant folk memory of other hominins that lived in the landscape before we arrived. But by fifty thousand years ago, all the hominins that had ever lived, and they were many different kinds, had died out except ours.

• 58:05Tristan Hughes?

  So do you mean by forty, do you mean by forty thousand?

• 58:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a, well, who knows exactly, by about forty thousand years. Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, fifty thousand years ago, there were lots and lots of humans. Forty thousand years ago, there was just one, there was just us. And we lived all over the Old World. And by the end of the last glaciation, modern humans lived from the Arctic to the tropical forests and even have moved into the Americas. And only Antarctica, Madagascar and New Zealand and some oceanic islands had not seen the tread of a human foot, but even those would succumb quite quickly.

• 58:43Tristan Hughes?

  It makes you realise also, doesn't it, for those of you listening in from North America or South America, actually how late in the story of human evolution, humans do actually cross that bearing land bridge into the Americas. Cause we focused largely on Eurasia and Africa today, but that's another interesting part of the chat and we've done episodes on the first Americans before. We've also done an episode with the one and only, the oracle of Neanderthal studies, Professor Chris Stringer.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:09Tristan Hughes?

  He basically says quite similar to you, Henry, about, you know, the how the Neanderthals die out, that lack of genetic diversity and basically Homo sapiens are just a bit better.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:19Tristan Hughes?

  At all of those important things that endure over time. I've got a paragraph from your book which feels good to, to read out now. It's only a sentence, actually, a couple of sentences. As you say, by forty thousand years ago, at the latest, Homo sapiens was the last hominid on earth. In just a few geological light blinks, it had not only eliminated all the other hominins, but it's spread to every part of the earth. And they say bar Madagascar, Antarctica, New Zealand and those specific islands. It's a huge journey, isn't it? Having gone from seven million years ago in Sahelanthropus and the first of those bipedal chimps that we know of, to Homo sapiens, to us today.

• 59:57Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, what a journey it has been. I mean, not for us personally, but but the whole story of human evolution.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Hmm. I think the thing that one has to emphasize, though, is that this is not a tale of manifest destiny. There was nothing written to say that humans would succeed and drive all the other hominins to extinction. I mean, as we've seen, hominins tried to invade Neanderthal territory several times and failed. And another thing is about genetic diversity. Neanderthals were unbelievably samey genetically. Now, it's known in Neanderthal history that most of them died out sometime in their history, and that their range was re-colonized by other Neanderthals from elsewhere. Well, the same is true for Homo sapiens. Humans have always been very, very rare. They've always been one meal from starvation and two or three meals from extinction.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  They always lived in very, very small groups, which tends to be inbred, and very thinly scattered over the landscape. And there have been times, maybe several, where humans have almost died out altogether. There was a an episode about hundred thousand years ago, maybe a bit more, when humans almost died out and only lived in refuges in southern Africa. That's actually quite contentious. But there is genetic evidence for repeated what's called genetic bottlenecks. That means that the population shrinks to a tiny, tiny amount and then reestablishes from that tiny, tiny population. And because there are only a certain amount of genetic variation in that tiny, tiny population,

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  the subsequent population becomes very samey. Everyone looks very similar because it's built from only a limited amount of genetic variation. And way back in hominin history, around a million years ago, there's been some recent work published in Science that described what must have been a very awkward age, about eight hundred thousand years ago, where for a million years, there were only about a thousand breeding humans at any one time. So there was a long period, and this was before Neanderthals, this was sort of Homo erectus time.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  But it's talking, it's, it's, it's looking at the genes of people alive today. There are signs that humans and our immediate ancestors almost became extinct many times. So the fact that we're alive today is really quite remarkable. And the fact that we are not only alive today, but we've spread throughout the earth with a genetic variability in the entire human species that is no greater than a tribe of chimps living in Cote d'Ivoire today. So we have this extraordinarily low genetic diversity. Maybe we succeeded because the animals didn't, was because their genetic diversity was even worse than ours.

• 1:02:53Tristan Hughes?

  Henry, you do cover that kind of humans today as well in this new book, which is called, it's not the Swiftig Eden book, titled, it is called, Henry?

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  It is called The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species is on the Edge of Extinction. And it's published by Picador in the UK on the 13th of March of this year, and in America by St Martin's Press on the 18th of March.

• 1:03:19Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Henry, it just goes to me to say, thank you for coming back on the podcast today.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 1:03:28Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was fan favourite guest, Dr Henry G, returning to the ancients to talk through the story of the rise of humans. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you want to listen to the other episodes which feature Dr Henry G, well then check out in our archive, our episodes on the origins of life on earth. There's another one called Top Five Dinosaurs, where Henry and I talk through our top five, including the brilliant species that was the Iguanodon with its thumb spikes. And another episode, another of Henry's pet favourite topics, which is the story of feathered dinosaurs, which has really come to the fore in the last couple of decades of scientific research. Thank you for listening to this episode of the ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:04:12Tristan Hughes?

  It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you can leave us a rating as well, we'd also really appreciate that. I would really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.