homo sapiens -- 7/5/23

05 Jul 2023

homo sapiens -- 7/5/23

0 COMMENTS

Today's selection -- from Unseen Beings: How We Forget the World Is More Than Human by Erik Jampa Andersson. Homo sapiens venture northward out of Africa:

“It's important to remember that humans weren't just plopped onto the Earth out of nowhere in the distant past. It's believed that Homo sapiens emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago, but our ancestors were already very much here, in myriad forms, and had been for over four billion years. Animism is, at its core, a dynamic recognition of this fact.

“Around 100,000 years ago, a bunch of Homo sapiens decided to leave their homeland and venture northward out of Africa; just as past hominids like Homo erectus, and even some stray H. sapiens, had done in ages past. It's likely that they migrated due, in part, to environmental factors, but for reasons unknown most ultimately decided to return to Africa. Then, around 40,000 years later, a second mass migration was attempted, also likely instigated by environmental stresses, and this time the early humans successfully established themselves in Eurasia ultimately expanding out to the Americas and Oceania.

“By this time in our prehistory, human proto-religion already come to involve some distinctly 'religious' features, like a belief in an afterlife and the emergence of 'shamans' tasked with facilitating interactions between human and non-human forces. In hunter-gatherer societies, the shaman's role became deeply important -- shamans led negotiations with the spirits of the land, encouraged social bonding through communal ritual, and facilitated healing through their medical knowledge and engagements with non-human forces. It's likely that they had a pivotal role in humanity's early migration processes, offering healing and emotional support in times of great uncertainty in a wild and foreign environment.

“One of their tasks may have been establishing relations with other hominids, since there were numerous hominid species already living in Afro-Eurasia. Neanderthals had been in Europe for over 300,000 years before Homo sapiens decided to settle in -- and far from being some brutish cavemen, these other humans were much like us in many respects. They made art, buried their dead, and likely engaged in ritual activities of their own.9 Many early human species may have used some form of verbal communication, and Homo erectus may have even built seafaring vessels to settle on the islands of Crete and Flores.

Carl Linnaeus coined the name Homo sapiens

“We're not entirely sure what happened to these other hominid species, though our own ancestors likely played a role in their disappearance. But it's clear we lived alongside them for some time, and procreated with them on occasion, which itself may have had a detrimental effect on their own populations." It's possible that we treated them as kin, at least for a time, and

who knows what the 'human' world would look like had they never disappeared. Even now some of these early hominids actually live on in our own bodies, with most modern humans containing at least some genetic admixture from species like the Neanderthals, Denisovans, H.habilis, and H. erectus.

“Early Homo sapiens flourished, both in Africa and beyond, due to many factors, particularly a talent for community-building. Like many animals, we tend to form close-knit social relationships, and, like all animals, we also have relatively fixed upper limits for manageable community sizes. Such limits are usually dependent upon how many direct relationships a single individual can comfortably maintain. When existential 'strangers' begin to seep into the mix, conflict arises, often leading to discord and disunity.

“As humans, we're usually limited to around 150 meaningful relationships at any one time, which also happens to be the general population limit for human communities over much of our early prehistory.