What happened to the other Human Species?

human

evolution a 7 million year history where we come from today we Homo sapiens are the only

human

species

left but that was not always the case for millions of years a wide variety of early human

species

thrived from the inhabitants from Indonesian islands with small brains To the robust Neand that dominated much of Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years, here's our list of extraordinary early humans who went extinct. Helping me in this video are human evolution experts Dr Chris Stringer and Professor Fred Spore from the Natural History Museum, along with specialists. from a series of ancient historical interviews that we have recorded over the years, so without further ado, let's begin number one Australopithecus Australopithecus lived about 4 and 2 million years ago in Africa and they looked very similar, they had a brain the size of an apse and a protuberant face with a large brow ridge over the eyes, but its teeth showed more human features.

This is a replica of a female asopus skull, so of course the lower jaw is missing. We are like humans and all our ancestors in our lineage. our tree is characterized by one very important thing: our canine teeth, which you can feel with your tongue in the corners of your mouth, your Canan teeth are small, they do not stick out and, to really illustrate this, I should mention our closest relative If we look at a chimpanzee, for example, you immediately see that those K9 teeth in the corner really stick out and in fact there is a space in front of them that accommodates Canan's teeth, which stick out quite a bit in the lower jaw, and that is a very particular character that we see. all share all of our ancestors dating back probably 7 million years ago, going further down the body, the bones and pelvic structure of an Australopithecus suggest that this species was bipedal, that is, they walked upright on two legs or probably in quite a different movement than how we walk today if you go to the upper torso and you go to the arms and shoulders, actually in many ways they still have an ape feel to them and it's a big debate for a long time whether that's the case. a remnant of the past that is no longer very important or they were actually still climbing very actively, so it's a combination of being two-legged biped on the ground and climbing trees, as well as for things like sleeping at night, looking for food on Australopithecus was a success. which had several different subspecies, there was Australopithecus Africanus and Australopithecus CA in South Africa, further north in central and eastern Africa, it had several more species, such as ostapius gari epicus anamensis and the largest tongue twister of all, Australopithecus bahel gazali, but of all Of these subspecies the iconic one is Australopithecus afarensis, named after the Afar region of Ethiopia, where its most famous specimen was discovered 50 years ago.

Her name is Lucy. You may have heard of her. One of the most complete hominid skeletons ever discovered. It is named after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds that was played at camp when the fossil was found. This is actually

what

is called a partial skeleton. It is more of a bag of bones and fragments. It is not very pretty. not much of the head remains but it was still the first some

what

more complete skeleton, in fact it is one of the smallest individuals of othus that we know of now Lucy often steals the headlines, but she is not the only extraordinary skeleton of othus picus which has been found in the early 2000s, paleoanthropologists found the remains of a baby Australopithecus who died when he was only 3 years old, approximately 3 million years old, he is the oldest child of whom we have surviving physical remains of a human ancestor that lived over a million years ago, compared to

other

primitive species, we actually have quite a few surviving fossils.

Australopithecus included many of their teeth and it is now generally accepted that that early group of individuals and relatives had a diet that focused primarily on plant foods, probably also larvae and insects and

other

things like those seen in chimpanzees. You can see this partly in the teeth, the kind of scratches that are left on them, but you can also see this in the isotopes that are preserved within the teeth, so it's a package of different pieces of evidence. Australicus was also a tool user. The earliest known tools are approximately 3.3. million years ago and come from the lqu site near lake takana in kenya, it is likely that groups of osts were using similar very simple tools which really demonstrate that even in the early stages of human evolution, stone tools were made in a One way or another, then what

happened

to Well, Australopithecus disappears from the human record about 2 million years ago.

They had been living alongside several other species of early humans in Africa and it could be that a competition for resources caused their downfall despite having existed for almost 2 million years. a very good race if we think about human evolution people always ask the question do you know where we really come from? what is something like the beginning now the true beginning. I must emphasize that the true beginning we estimate is about 7 million years ago. and about that first half of that whole period we don't know much, but about 4 million years ago we have an idea of ​​what really is the basis of our branches that ultimately lead to us and the aeropics really have a vital role there, it's a creature that represents that combination of being a relatively primitive chimpanzee in the head with being a two-legged biped that walks on the ground and having all those adaptations as a kind of template from which everything else evolved as it was now.

It's time for a new species to come out on top not only in Africa but also in the broader field, Homo erectus number two, so this is a big species, the longest-lived human species to ever grace this Earth, As far as we know, the homogeneity that is the The genus to which humans belong emerged in Africa approximately 2.5 million years ago with a species called Homo habilis habis had a larger brain than Australopithecus and smaller teeth, but not yet It was completely bipedal like Ostapius, it seems that the Habis were still very adept. Well, that all changed with homoerectus that emerged in Africa about 2 million years ago.

The erectus had a much larger brain size than the habis and was generally a little larger, but the real gamech Cher in erectus Anatomy was in the proportions of the pelvis and limbs, so this is the pelvic girdle of Homerus belongs This skull is called a Naromi child, it has more or less the same shape as ours, it is a little smaller but it has the same plate effect that we have and we know from the joint of the femur the upper part of the leg Bone that is articulated in the same way as ours and gives us a strong indication that they were able to move in pretty much the same way we can move, that's how we know they are runners.

They are completely bipedal, they are what they call an oblate biped, which is their absolutely normal mode of locomotion. There's no climbing trees or anything. These are really critical parts to help us understand erectus behavior and potential behaviors. Yes is funny. name, but that is why erectus is called Homo erectus, literally upright man, it is this development that many scientists believe is key to one of the most fascinating parts of erectus, its history, that is, to what extent in the entire world the first known human species finally spread. From Africa, remains of erectus have been found in places as far away as China and Indonesia, moving in social groups.

Communities of erectus inhabited much of the Eurasian world and also brought with them a very interesting object. Araus, we believe, is the inventor of the hand axe, so What you have here is what they call a bifacial tool or it is shaped on two sides and the nap is the process of removing flakes in a controlled manner to impose a shape on the stone itself, one of the most critical. inventions in the entire history of humanity without these there would be no phones or space shuttles or cars or anything like that. This is a mobile tool for a very mobile hunter.

You can take it with you. You can resharpen it just by finding it. a pebble and putting a new edge on it you can cut it with it you can fill it with meat you can scrape the flesh from a skin this shape does not exist in nature this shape is not suggested by the rock you are sleeping on you have to carry this shape in your head, you impose the how a sculptor imposes form on marble and you learn that from your social group you collect it socially, carry it socially and transmit it socially when it comes to the incredible extinct human species homoerectus. has to be on any list, they are a game changer in the history of human evolution in some parts of the world erectus still existed almost 200,000 years ago, so why did they become extinct?

We believe that erectina became homo hyal bensis for a long time. they may well have been parallel to each other this is in Africa so this is called Bodo it's around 600,000 years old it's a good one in fact I think it's the oldest Heidleberg we've found found in Africa the oldest spikes we've ever found found in Africa are around a million years old, perhaps in certain disputed specimens they are reduced to 900,000 or 800,000, around 600,000 we no longer see, although there may be one or two examples that some people agree with. Things have changed? Why would this be a more successful adaptation outperformed the parents in some sense, you know, did the kid do better than the adult than mom and dad?

We really don't know. All we know is that around 600,000 in Africa it doesn't look any clearer. -cut unequivocal erection just find Heidle's nonsense maybe they were better at being more sociable maybe their ability to hunt for competition was better developed we don't know for the Javan species of around 100,000 um why did they last so much longer there? that anywhere else in the world we do not know Homo floresiensis number three that remains in East Asia in the hills of Homo erectus is one of the most confusing but extraordinary human species ever discovered. It's called homofloriensis, nicknamed The Hobbit because that's, you guessed it.

The remains of this species were incredibly small. It appeared to be a dwarf human species that was found only in the Indies. Ian, Flores Island. The first homofloriensis fossils were discovered 20 years ago in 2003, right around the time the Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed. was coming to an end, hence the nickname The Hobbit homop florensis is really a very unusual creature, so if I mention the homoerectus here and hold it next to the skull of the homo florensis we can see that there is a huge difference in size, so which is a tiny creature. It is well known from the fossil record that when mammals and other creatures arrive on islands and very often predators are no longer present, the entire body begins to change and one thing that happens almost universally is that body size reduces. , there are examples. of miniature elephants, miniature hippos on the Mediterranean islands and, in fact, along with the fossils of homo florensis there is a miniature elephant, it is also called um, it is also present because the island of Flores is quite isolated and there is no natural predators aside from kodo dragons now there is still a lot that baffles scientists about Homo fienis from The Remains, we have their diets that could have included both plants and raw meat from creatures like stegodon, rodents and maybe even kodo dragons, but one of the biggest enigmas about the Fen senses is how it got to the island of Flores that's a question how it got there but also where it came from what was the ancestral species um now nearby the only species we know of at that time is homoerectus and there is certain features that are good There are a number of features on the skull that really remind us of homoerectus, so in that concept, in that interpretation, it really is a homoerectus dwarf that lived in Java, transported by raft in one way or another , not on purpose, but just in a storm or whatever. a group, a family group, whatever, may have rafted with two Flos and become isolated and shrink in size and voila, now we have a homo florensis, if you look at other parts of the body, they say it's actually so primitive that that can't happen. of Homo erectus this must come from an earlier ancestor.

Now the problem with this is that we have absolutely no evidence of any other honor leaving Africa other than Homo erectus, so in my book the possibility of it being some species of descendant of a very early arrival of homoerectus is not one of the really later ones, but a very early arrival of homoerectus remains the most plausible now that these Indonesian islands are fascinating when it comes to studying peculiar human species that noware extinct on the island of Luzon, another small early human Homo lenensis has also been discovered and this is just the beginning. There are likely even more as-yet-unknown archaic human species waiting to be discovered on islands across Indonesia.

Watch this space. Hormone number four nedi of an extraordinary small brain. Small body human. From one species to another discovered deep in a cave system in South Africa, it is called Homon Nedi. You may have heard about it in the recent Netflix documentary. The Cave of Bones Nedi remains were first discovered in 2013 and initial excavations of the cave chamber revealed hundreds of fossils one of the richest human evolution sites in the world we had dozens and dozens of individuals all from this chamber , something like 1,500 fossils in that first expedition from an excavated area of ​​approximately one meter by 50 cm with access to as many fossils Lee burer and his team were able to reconstruct the skeletons of homoni and their anatomy showed similarities with species such as ostapius and homohabilis, has It's been very positive the way the material became available and very quickly replicas were made available so we had replicas within a year of the material to put in our human evolution exhibit if we look at the skull and jaw fragments and these .

They are replicas, first of all, a small brain, this is a gorilla-sized brain inside the brain case, so a very small brain, a fairly strong forehead, a crest for just a small specimen, a wall relatively thin, so it is not somewhat primitive in that sense, the jaw is interesting because it has Of course, there is no chin in the front, it is quite robust, the teeth are primitive in the sense that, for example, they are made larger towards the end of the tooth row, but they are small teeth, and in that sense, they look quite human in terms of tooth size and When we look at something like ham bones, we can see that, first of all, it is a very small hand, but it has a long thumb and that is a very human characteristic and yet the fingers are curved, as we would find them in Ostop Thein and in the great apes. and that suggests that this creature was probably still climbing trees and walking upright on the ground because the whole skeleton shows this interesting combination of the hip bones and the legs and the feet suggesting good upright walking on two legs and, without However, the upper body shoulders, arms, and hands suggest that this creature was also good in trees.

His brain size was also quite small, not much larger than that of an ape, and yet when these bones were dated, they revealed that Nedi had been living for about 300,000 years. A long time ago along with early Homo sapiens, much later in the history of human evolution than expected and that's actually quite recent for something that has an apex brain that lived in South Africa at a time when we think early Homo sapiens existed in other parts of Africa, uh, and there was a species called homo Hydro begenis or homor renis that still existed, we think in Zambia, so at least three types of humans, but this one has a much smaller brain and apparently more primitive, so let's talk about where these nedi remains were discovered.

The cave system is called ascending. The star and Ley's remains were discovered right at the bottom of this system, beneath an incredibly thin conduit, hundreds of fossils lay on the surface, so what were they doing there so deep in the cave system? Well, this is where things start to get controversial. The excavation is paleoanthropologist Lee Berer Lee is convinced he has found evidence that the Nedi ventured into this cave chamber to bury their dead. Until this point it was believed that practices such as burial were only carried out by humans with large brains. , modern humans, us, but possibly also neand so Well, this statement has raised quite a few eyebrows, we assume that evolution has driven that big brain for a good reason related to complex behavior and yet here is a creature with a brain less than half the size of our brain that is apparently also doing that complex behavior.

So that would raise the question of why we have such big brains if Nedi can do all this complex behavior with such a small brain. That's one of the critical questions, and of course, then there's the strength of the evidence that an article criticizing these claims has. just came out, I really think they analyze the claims, test them and conclude that there is good evidence that Nedi buried the dead of him. There is no good evidence that Nedi produced those engravings, if in fact they are engravings and not natural markings and evidence of fire. The jury is out on that because the evidence hasn't even been published properly, but how do we know that those fires were set by Ned and not, say, later humans who were in the cave?

So there really are a lot of question marks over those claims now, regardless, let's not do it. Overlook the absolute wonder of the discovery of a human with a small brain who survived very late in the history of human evolution and no doubt more information about this exciting early human will be revealed in the coming years number five NE andal can't be talk about extinct human species. And without mentioning the Nandal, the Neand were long seen as the other classic in the history of human evolution, the less intelligent scavenger hominid that lost to Homo sapiens in this great game and became extinct, but that view has changed. in recent years, okay?

Well, here I have a nice reconstruction replica of a neol and you can see some of the typical features, so there's a big brain in there, a brain the same size as ours, essentially, but the brain case is longer and lower, there is a large eyebrow. eliminate the double arched eyebrow eliminate in the forehead the forehead is low perhaps you have the most distinctive feature when you look at a skull this half of the face thrown forward this big nose and many of us have big noses a high nose or a protruding nose or a wide nose, the neand TOs had all three combined and the cheekbones are swept back behind that nose, so half of the face is pulled forward, very characteristic, the teeth are large in size, in general, the teeth They are quite small, not too small.

It is different from ours in size, but the front teeth are relatively larger. You can see that they are very worn on this individual and that is something that we find often on the lower jaw, there is not much sign of a chin and of course here in the ear region. The CT scan shows us that Neand's middle and inner ear bones involved with hearing and balance were a slightly different shape than ours, so even those small bones can tell us whether he's a Neand or a Homo sapiens. The Neear existed until approximately 40,000 years ago. For years we believe that we lost sight of them in the evant fossil about 40,000 years ago the distance in time they go back depends on what we call Neal, so there is some material from the seim delot the bone pit in tap Pua that dates It's approximately 430,000 years old and this is a wonderful collection, a huge collection of fossils from the depths of a cave system.

Every part of the skeleton is represented and in the teeth these fossils look very neon and there's even some DNA, the oldest human DNA ever recovered from a couple of fossils and that suggests that this material is early in the Neand lineage, so so on that basis we have about 400,000 years of Neals evolution in Europe and Asia. They were large and bulky, their bodies robustly built to withstand very active activity. The lifestyle of having such a large body meant that the Neand required more energy than today, more food and thanks to a number of Neand settlements that have been discovered across Eurasia, we know quite a bit about their diet.

The Neand were expert hunters of the shuringan site in Germany. Several wooden spears that are about 300,000 years old have been discovered right around the time of Neals. In Europe they also used stone-tipped spears that were almost certainly used to hunt animals both large and small. We have this type of lalwa tips that we believe. They may have begun to become accustomed to bowing spears. Potentially, they began tilting their spears with stones about 230,000 years ago. Something like this is very important to keep in mind, although they did not stop making wooden spears, so they continued making wooden spears.

Also, there is a later site called a lingan dating back to about 125 years ago, where a complete U-shaped spear is found in association with a butchered elephant, a straight-tusked elephant which is a huge animal, so spears are still being made. of wood, but potentially start. You know, using stone, stone tip. Specially crafted spears and scrapers made of rock, such as flint, were then used to butcher the carcass of a hunted animal and extract as much food as possible from a carcass. Nothing was wasted on these hunter-gatherers. The society's prey could include the iconic Ice Age Megap for large beasts such as woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos at the Paleolithic site of Laot De Sand Brad on the island of Jersey.

Piles of butchered mammoth and rhino bones have been discovered dating back to the Neand era, more than 100,000 years ago. It appears to have been an important base for NE Andal communities who would have hunted herds of animals like Mammoth on the large plane overlooking this cave in the Paleolithic, but their food could also include smaller prey and Neal's diet varied depending on where in the world did that community live, but let's talk about cannibalism, there is some evidence of it, however, these cases are rare and cannibalism certainly does not seem to have been a staple of a Neand diet away from meat and game.

Analysis of Nadal's teeth. from sites such as Shanidar Cave in the Near East suggests that these communities also ate a wide variety of plants, nuts, seeds and fruits, for example nean, and were expert hunters, but they were also expert gatherers, so of course, The picture we have of Nean archeology is based mainly on cave sites, where the material is well preserved, where they lived, there is evidence in some open sites and, of course, we know that sea levels have changed, so in the peaks of the last ice age sea level fell 125 M and There were large areas of exposed land in the Mediterranean, for example, and between Britain and Europe there was a large area of ​​dry land called the Land of Dogs that existed during the time of the Neals and we know that the Neanders were occupying that landscape.

Stone tools are found on the seabed, dredged in fishermen's nets, washed ashore, so we know NEOS are there and there is even part of a neol fossil from the North Sea, which was recovered in the Netherlands. from the aandal frontal bone, so there are also neol fossils down there that live in small groups. The Andos were a dominant human species in Europe for hundreds of years, even surviving in Britain on this distant edge of the habitable world, so don't imagine it. If they walked around naked they would have worn some type of clothing, what that clothing looks like, however we don't know, there is also evidence of Neal's art of fire making and potentially burial.

Some people 20 or more years ago doubted that NE was buried. dead, they argue that these bodies of neols in caves were victims of falls from roofs or that the bones were simply washed away, the body had just been dragged into a crevice and then covered up, but I think there is now a lot of evidence from various sites that the neols were buried intentionally. They are dead, we have objects inside the tombs that look like they were put there with the body, we even have body coverings, so for example, a Neal baby was buried in Syria with a stone slab on top. from the body and that stone slab was brought from outside the cave, it is not part of the cave wall that just fell and they have technology, you know, they are making things like spears throwing spears, they are even making resin to attach the heads .

The stone tool is directed to a wooden handle, producing that resin and turning it into glue requires a series of special steps for it to be truly effective and the Andar were able to make the Anor exist approximately between 500,000 and 40,000 years ago, which which means yes. had interactions with modern humans, not only that, but we know that it also interbred with Homo sapiens, so perhaps around 50,000 years ago Homo sapiens had emerged from Africa and of course stayed in Africa as well, but a small group of homo sapiens left for the West. Asia and shortly after they encountered NE atiles and there was a process of miscegenation between these groups and as a result ofThat, outside of Africa, we all have about 2% of the neol DNA still in our genomes from that ancient interbreeding and Surprisingly, in Denis from a cave in Siberia there is evidence that NE anatar not only reproduced with us, Homo sapiens, but that there were people there called Denans and there is a first generation hybrid, a bone has been analyzed for DNA and it is approximately 50% Neal and 50% Denivan, so she is a girl who had a Neal mother and a Denivan father, some day we will find the same type of evidence for us in the aniles, sooner or later real hybrids of direct mating between anal and Homo sapiens will be found thanks to the work done by archaeologists at a crossing of Asia EUR the ancient vision of Neos has stupid scavengers that they are always going to lose to the smarter and superior homo saans, well, who has been put to bed, but neol finally became extinct, the big question is why The disappearance of the neanders HS I mean, first of all, we have to discuss really yes they are really extinct if you know there is 2% of their DNA in many people alive today um some.

People have calculated that if you pool all the Neal DNA from around the world into the genomes of different people, you could reconstruct 40 or 50% of the Neal genome, and of course that's present in thousands of million people, so there is actually more neon DNA on Earth today than there was 50,000 years ago, that's a remarkable thought, yes, physically extinct, they disappeared as far as we know about 40,000 years ago, so why what disappeared? I mean the short answer is we don't know, there are a lot of different ideas and I think it was probably a combination of things so I don't think it's a coincidence that they disappeared shortly after Homo sapiens started entering their territories and growing in numbers, in a sense, you could say that perhaps they were an endangered species and that appearance of another human species alongside them could have ultimately been what brought them to the brink of extinction.

Lots of climate changes happening at that time that may have affected their numbers. The possibility that there were some external events. A large volcanic eruption. 39,000 years ago in Italy some people said there was a burst of cosmic radiation, but from 50,000 years on we started to see this gradual dominance of homo sapiens, probably at the expense of these other human species, so there you have our list of the five . The most extraordinary first humans that went extinct, subscribe and tell us your opinion in the comments.