A Cosmic Thought
Research keeps showing the universe is grander, and humanity older, than once thought
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Each year this space reviews important recent scientific findings, especially in cosmology and anthropology: starting with the premise that we know one percent of what can be known.
Imagine when we know two percent!
Anthropology:
Researchers led by Elena Arciero of the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, which studies human genetics, showed people were living in the Himalayas 10,000 years ago. They possessed a gene mutation that allowed them to survive on the low oxygen levels of high-altitude air.
Seems hard to believe people could have lived at such altitudes during an ice age and without any technology. But human history is rich in feats that seem hard to believe.
Last year researchers led by Marta Sánchez de la Torre at the University of Barcelona showed that 25,000 years ago, during the Glacial Maximum – coldest phase of the ice age – people in what’s now Spain sometimes traveled hundreds of miles as hunter-gatherers.
Evidence was found that hippo lived along the Rhine River Valley 31,000 years ago – during an ice age.
From the study of African fossils, researchers at NYU are reasonably sure our hominin ancestors first stood upright 7 million years ago.
That’s 350,000 generations! It’s much father back in the past than once assumed, reflecting the main trend line of A Cosmic Thought – science continuously finds the universe is larger and grander, the human family older, than was believed by great minds of prior centuries.
Researchers led by Rob Davis at the British Museum in London found evidence Neanderthals in what’s now southern England were using fire to cook food 400,000 years ago.
That’s 20,000 generations! Again, farther back in the past than thought. The previous standard guesstimate was the first controlled use of fire happening 50,000 years ago. Make that 400,000 years!
Ancient peoples not only figured out how to control fire – they knew cooking meat made it tasty and better for health. (Cooking kills pathogens.) This happened 20,000 generations ago.
Can’t top that? Other new research shows tool-making human forebears lived in northern England 440,000 years ago.
That’s 40,000 years before the mastery of fire. That’s 2,000 generations of people living in a cold place without fire – or at least, without leaving any evidence of fire.
In a cave in South Africa, animal bones from one million years ago were found with scorch marks. This might have occurred because of natural wildfire. What if there was controlled use of fire for cooking one million years ago?
Skull of a Denisovan, found in China. Photo courtesy New Scientist.
Pop culture tends to assume Homo sapiens overcame the Neanderthals and the Denisovans because we were more violent. Research is trending in the opposite direction –the big advantage to Homo sapiens is that we were more cooperative.
Another possibility was proposed last year: a genetic mutation in people allowed them to resist the harm from naturally occurring lead in drinking water. This made Homo sapiens smarter than Neanderthals and Denisovans, who never evolved lead-resistance genes.
First evidence of Denisovans was discovered by Qiaomei Fu, a Chinese paleontologist. She’s been trying to show that genetically modern humans populated China at least 100,000 years ago, which would be much farther back in the past than the Out of Africa theory assumes.
Out of Africa theory, known to researchers as the Recent African Origins hypothesis, holds that modern humans evolved solely in Africa around 150,000 years ago, then began moving to other places 60,000 to 90,000 years ago. Qiaomei Fu is the best known of Chinese paleontologists who hope to prove there were two separate evolutions of modern humans, one in Africa and the other in Asia.
