Paleoanthropologist Answers Caveman Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm

paleoanthropologist

Steve Churchill. Let's answer some

questions

from the Internet. This is the

support

of Sean Spain's cavemen. Ask how cavemen hunted with clubs. The animals are very fast. We often think of cavemen as having clubs. They probably use clubs, but we already know that. Humans were moving into Ice Age Europe and they had really long spears, like 6 or 7 feet tall, and we know that they sometimes tipped those spears with stones like this to make lethal, sharp stabs. Early modern people had real long-range projectiles. Weaponry like bow and arrow and in some places spear throwers, the spear has a striker on the other end that fits into that hook so the spear would stay parallel to the spear thrower and then when you throw it it allows you to propel throws it a distance. of about 40 meters or about 120 feet in Karen Ryden asks.

I made 23 on me. He had 89% of everyone's Neander variant in his system. What does that mean? You have more Neanderthal genes than 89% of the people who have submitted their DNA. Now most of us only have a small proportion of Neander genes, only about 1 to 4% of the first members of our species migrated out of Africa, met and sometimes interbred with Neanderthals, so if you have any ancestry from Europe or Asia, you probably have We have some Neanderthal genes, we have complete genomes of several Neander Tals. We may know, for example, that some Neander Tals had red hair, so you might think, hey, if I have red hair, maybe I got it from Neander Tals, but it actually turns out that it's a different gene that causes red hair. in the ander tals, so not all redheads are descended from the ander tals, but because most redheads are European, most redheads have some neanderthal genes in slugg apotamus how do you think the Ice Age is historically.

Well, it's actually pretty accurate. In this clip you can see some animals moving beyond these gigantic, thick layers of ice. Most of the animals depicted in Ice Age. Giant ground sloths. Woolly mammoths. Saber-toothed cats were actually around here in North America. In some places the ice sheets were up to 2 and 2 miles thick and I love the way they represent the barren land and just the dirt around the glaciers. When you have ice sheets like that, deserts form right against them because the ice sheets absorb everything. moisture from the atmosphere and creates snow on the ice sheets.

I think the humans they depict are also quite accurate - they are shown wearing custom-made clothing. We find bone needles in the archaeological record starting about 30,000 years ago and that indicates that people were capable of sewing clothing, but there are a couple of things that are inaccurate: you wouldn't see animals near ice sheets, animals live where grow their plants and the other thing is that there are no saber-toothed squirrels in Andy Doodle's fossil record. 56 question, okay paleoanthropology nerds, what species is the Geico

caveman

, well let's look at the morphology of the forehead ridge and the really big nose and facial architecture, she looks a lot like a Neander, she's Alishna asks what happened to the Neander TS, well, frankly, I think we made them into humans who moved into their territory, we competed with them and reproduced them.

They were short, stocky and very muscular. They also had short limbs, short arms and legs, which reduced the surface area through which they lost heat and kept warm. of a strange architecture of the nose and face that also helped them deal with the cold air they breathed those bodies were very good at producing heat but that is not good for conserving energy they had very expensive bodies they were expensive to move move expensive to feed It was expensive to stay warm, and therefore they didn't have much room left in their energy budgets to devote to reproduction.

They had a lot of competition in the form of large ferocious carnivores, such as cave lions, cave hyenas, saber-toothed cats, wolves, and grizzlies. bears and probably for much of their history in Europe tall Neanders were just hanging on by a thread in Roxy, not L asks, hey, where did the first humans live? If you look at the early stages of human evolution, the first 4 million years are completely here in Africa where we have small Apen opus oysters we find them here in the rift valley in East Africa in countries like Kenya Tanzania Ethiopia and We found them in southern Africa in cave systems outside Johannesburg about 2 and a half million years ago. of our own genus as homohabilis begin to emerge and that includes Homo erectus and Homo erectus is the first to leave Africa.

We pick up Homo erectus initially in the Republic of Georgia and then eventually in Indonesia and one might wonder how Homoerectus got there. For Indonesia, those are islands, keep in mind that this happens during ice ages and during glacial intervals, sea levels go down and in places where there is a shallow sea, the sea floor is exposed and Indonesia just becomes on a peninsula connected to the southern part of Asia and then homoerectus could walk towards those islands while a new species emerges comes out of homo erectus most of us would call it homo heidleberg enus it looks like this guy here the same Homo erectus with large eyebrows and a huge upturned face here in Europe gives rise to the Neanderthals and in Africa they evolved into our own species Homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago and about 70,000 years ago they began to expand out of Africa and probably found populations of homo erectus that They eliminated and 40,000 years ago they moved to Europe and began to encounter the Neanderthals whom they defeated and around 20,000 years ago they were here in eastern Siberia and crossed the land bridge where they became the Native Americans we know. know the reality today The seeker asks if the cavemen had a sense of humor probably they did have a sense of humor this is a representation of an i which is a kind of wild goat you know you can see its head here and its body and its legs and he has something coming out of his butt here, which might be the first poop joke on imw KI asks how did humans survive the Ice Age OMG I can barely stand to be outside for more than 5 minutes when the temperature drops below 0°C.

The Neander Tals had fire, sure, but these early modern humans in Europe probably had better homes with pyro

tech

nic

tech

nology that channeled airflow so they could stoke the fire. When the ice ages really increased they stood still and just hunkered down and dealt with it in a hasty retweet question: do you know how they discovered those 3T tall early human fossils in Indonesia? They called them Hobbits as a nickname, which is really cool, but they really missed the opportunity to call them Neander shorts. I'm going to steal that one because that's at the intersection of dad jokes and pale anthropology.

Hobbits are a species of primitive humans and come from a small island in Indonesia called Flores Island, which is why the species is called homo floresiensis. These guys are descendants of homo erectus. The homoerectus came out to Flores. The island got stuck there when you get stuck on an island, if you're a small bodied mammal, like a small rodent or something, you tend to get bigger, if you're a larger bodied mammal, you tend to get smaller, which is llama insular dwarfism and so these little hobbits find themselves living in a context of giant rats and little dwarf elephants called stegodon and being hunted by things like kodo dragons in Caleb llama asks an honest question: did the Cav men have pets?

The only domesticated animal we have during the Stone Age is The Dog The first undisputed dogs in the fossil record come from a site in Germany called Bon Ober Castle, where there is a human Buri with a dog. They are used to help in hunting. They are used to help defend against carnivores. We do not. start seeing things like cattle or goats until humans settle down and start farming after about 10,000 years ago in World of paleo anth asks how the afarensis specimen nicknamed Lucy got her name Lucy is a partial skeleton of 3 .2 million old fossil from Ethiopia that represents the species Australopithecus afarensis and is one of the most famous fossils in existence.

She was found in 1974. The team that found her was playing The Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds incessantly at Camp and they named Lucy after that song in fifo. Kwii asks things. I'm too tired to Google. When did hominids start having hair that grows indefinitely in a quadrangle? Most of the sunlight falls on their back and their hair protects their skin. They don't have as much hair on their bellies because there is shade down there for a biped, most of the solar radiation falls on the top of the head, shoulders and upper back, so homoerectus probably retained the hair on the top of the head to block solar radiation and develop capacity. make it longer to protect the head, shoulders and upper back from sunburn in B z73 asks, for example, what did cavemen do about dental hygiene?

Well, unfortunately, probably not much, we have some fossils that denote habitual use of toothpicks where I've used toothpicks so much that they've actually created little grooves in their teeth, but before that we had guys like this guy from Africa who has some 250,000 years old, he is a representative of homo heidleberg enus and has absolutely rotten teeth with huge cavities. probably because he was eating a lot of honey, he has a hole in the side of his head here, which is probably due to an infection from bacteria that enter the bloodstream from these cavities and circulate around and create an infection on the side of his skull and this it's probably what killed him in twins z254 64257 ask what your favorite ancient hominid is my paleoanthropology friends oh that's like asking me to choose my favorite son I'll say these guys are one of my favorites a 250,000 year old species called holti I was member of a team that found them in caves in South Africa through a shaft that is about 40 feet long and about 7 feet wide.

Too small for me to get in there, we actually needed a whole team of small-bodied diggers to get down into this chamber. They have an apex brain. They have a very primitive morphology on the face. They are probably one of the most primitive members of our genus, but very late in time there are relic species that simply remained unchanged over time until we find them in the caves of South Africa in Blues Liquor asks what is the missing link between ape and man. Well, as a

paleoanthropologist

, I have to tell you that we hate the term Missing Link and that kind of thinking leads to conceptions of a March of Progress where evolution is just a gradual series of progressive changes over time, but the human family tree was very, very bushy, there were many species that we recognize between 28 and 30 of them approximately 6 million years ago, our lineage began to diverge from the lineage. that leads us to live chimpanzees and bonobos our first ancestors would look like a chimpanzee like this chimpanzee skull here they had very snout faces like a chimpanzee but you would be impressed by the fact that they walk on two legs and that their canine teeth this Big Fang here in In reality it was a little smaller, but other than that, they are very chimpanzees like in the bush games ask if gigantopithecus existed why can't Bigfoot why not, in fact giganto us was a huge ape if he stood on his hind legs.

It was probably about 8 feet tall, maybe twice the size of a gorilla with a huge head and huge teeth. They probably lived in bamboo like panda bears and lived in Asia until about half a million years ago and some people have thought that perhaps the yeti in the Himalayas or Bigfoot in North America are just relict populations of gigantopithecus that would require the gigantopithecus to cross the Sea rolling towards North America without leaving any kind of fossil record, but maybe that happened to Patrick Sun, ask brother, when did language start? Neanderthals have brains that were as large as ours and appear to have the neural structures one would need to produce language.

We can tell from the nerve holes at the base of the skull that they had very good motor control of their tongues. Neander TS had a very long low braincase and a more protruding face and that results in a flatter skull base, so Neander Tals probably could only produce one or two vowel sounds in our species Homo sapiens, our face is more hidden under the brain. In this case we have a more globular cranial vault and that creates a curvature at the base of the brain case. Herewe have flexion. This inflection gives us a resonant space that allows us to produce the full range of vowel sounds.

Keep in mind that even monkeys use verbal communication, there are things like beeps and chimpanzees that mean something to their group members at seven o'clock. Bringers asks what cavemen did for fun, well it's probably not much to tell you the truth that we know in the later part of the Paleolithic or in the Stone Age that they are making some musical instruments because we have recovered flutes made from bones of birds, people don't start painting on cave walls until modern humans are in Europe towards the end of the Ice Age. What is really interesting about these caves?

The paintings often tend to make use of features and reliefs on the cave walls, so that if there was a fire burning in the cave chamber, the flickering of the fire would make these animals appear as if they were moving. These Paleolithic artists. We're using a lot of different pigments, sometimes it's ground ocher, which is an iron oxide, sometimes it's manganese, maybe they're crushing plant material like berries and a lot of times we have handprints from when they put their hands against the cave wall and then probably by chewing some manganese or ocher and spitting it out, they create like a spray paint pattern around your hand. vichel asks what makes humans unique moral creativity consciousness ability to reason and rationality self-awareness what is truly unique about humans is the extremes to which we take these things the extremes to which we become dependent on technology language and connections social we know from the archaeological and fossil record in Europe that the Neanderthals lived in very small social groups; they may have only known 40 or 50 other Neanders.

Just as early modern humans seem to have extended social networks, they seem to be exchanging things over long distances, so early modern humans in Europe probably knew hundreds of other early modern humans in Europe. Venus. The rules deck raises the only historical question I want answered at this point is what is the damn purpose behind the Venus figures? Well, Venus figures like this Venus de vill andorf that you see here, some people have thought that they are fertility figures, but the truth is that not all of them are women, most of them are not even human figures and probably what these are things are trade items when people visit other groups they take them with them to give us gifts in mcus asks a quick question: what did cavemen do if there were no caves in their area if they live in an area with no caves they just They made do with open-air shelters, primitive tents made of sticks and animal skins, and use animal skins as bedding.

It's ironic that we call them cavemen because at first they usually lived in rock shelters, not in an actual cave, and when we found them in caves they always lived at the mouth of the cave in CFA Yin asks then, what did humans eat? before the discovery of fire? Our ancestors still ate a lot of plant material and that meant they needed big guts because you had to have a big gut to break down that high-fiber diet by the time homoerectus showed up they were starting to cook things they were starting to grind food up probably with cutting tools. stone this is a 1.7 to 1.5 million year old hand ax from Africa it is probably a large scale butchery tool and the best thing about fire is that it allows us to break down food before eating it and, In fact, we can get a lot more calories and nutrients from them, so that's all the

questions

for today thanks for watching

caveman

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