Humanity 1 Million Years Ago



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What was Humanity up to 1,000,000 years ago?

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
1:20 Thanks to Kiwico
3:17 Our strangest cousins
6:48 Big game hunters
8:36 Hand axes
11:05 The first carpenters
12:56 A global species
15:42 Our tiniest cousin
18:04 life in the cold
20:35 Burnt grass
22:27 The biggest difference
23:55 A hard life

Sources:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0080347
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-86642-z
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379120305746
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1221285110
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248400904664
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248414002309
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08844
https://www.nature.com/articles/163492b0
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088329
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1117620109
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248412001406

Written and Edited by Stefan Milosavljevich
Artwork by Ettore Mazza
Script help by Dr. Anna Goldfield

Huge thanks to my generous patrons
https://www.patreon.com/stefanmilo

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39 thoughts on “Humanity 1 Million Years Ago”

  1. All your videos are good to really good. This one is excellent! Very professionally done. Solid science. Keepling clear what we know, we we are guessing, and what we do NOT know. 393k subscribers? Should be MUCH more.

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  2. Just imagine if they had enough language to sit by the fire telling stories of their hunts and other adventures similar to the ancient Greeks, but not dramas and comedies as we understand them.

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  3. As somebody that is capable of speech, but largely non verbal (selective mutism) There is so much more to language than just words. It's not just verbalizations of words. It's sound, expression and movement.

    Aside from difficulty speaking, I also deal with actually comprehending spoken words. But I can still understand what needs to happen.

    I could have Donny Dust tell me how to do it and nothing would happen. If we sat down and he just talked about whatever and I just watched and listened to the noises being made by both the rock and him you learn how things are being moved, force necessary to apply etc… In not being able or even needing to hear him talking, I drown out the noise and can focus on actually learning the task.

    Probably just more autism / ADHD and hunter gatherer connections like the recent berry gathering research lol

    Example, a bad piece of stone. How do you communicate the appearance of something as being a resource vs garbage?

    Pick up the garbage, you make a foul face, maybe a bleach / vomit like noise and throwing motion. It's things we still do to this day, usually subconsciously.

    Pick

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  4. Cubico = land and ocean fill

    Take children to learn the earth, trees, waters, skies, other animals, people who know the nature of themselves.
    Not watching this channel following that ad.

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  5. "All life comes from a single moment of creation. Some 3.8 billion years ago in some bubbling mud pot or deep ocean thermal vent. Some little bag of chemicals twitched and became animate and than miraculously reproduced itself. Everything that lives now on earth, or ever has lived, descends from that moment. We are all built from a single original blueprint. I don't believe there is a more important or remarkable fact in the natural world, indeed in any world, then that one." ~Bill Bryson, 2012

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  6. Also mr. Milo, please let us know if you're ever doing some kind of public lecture .. truly would love to absorb and discuss knowledge in person-ish! You have an amazing ability to deliver an academic lecture (i hate using that term for the "boring" implications but i mean it in it's most positive interpretation!)

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  7. 23:20 Very likely the first works of art were made on a media that would not survive. Patterns scratched in the ground, destroyed by the first rainstorm. Or drawing on the walls of a cave made with charcoal and washed away later my water.

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  8. Also to note; along with the first use of protective coverings of animal skins, would have been the time H.Sapiens first started losing the hair on their bodies, possibly along with a drop in testosterone levels of hunter gathering tribes due to domestication of easily obtained protein from range farming. Probably also due to friction from wearing animal skins, if my legs are any example of clothes wearing.

    The thing I object to with the artists impressions of early H.sapiens is the clean skin of their bodies. Hairless, even by today's standards of hairy males and females (ever seen a female who doesn't shave!). I doubt either sex shaved their entire bodies every morning, back then, before heading out into the wilderness for the day's hunt for food. Mostly, even Neanderthal are depicted as clean skinned in noble savage renderings.

    Until clothing was purposefully designed as permanent fixtures, humans would have been clothed in hairy bodies and faces, which remains an obvious hairy remnant from all species of early anthropoids, and still bearishly displayed on many males today. Back then, males and females would have been ten-fold hairish.

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  9. Many years ago I watched a local doco about reinvestigating the range of skulls at the Queensland Museum. Old footage was shown of a line of skulls and a man saying the small ones were children. This doco went on to claim a whole tribe of small people were found buried near one of the big lakes, and some of those possibly mislabelled skulls were from that tribe.. maybe near Lake Eyre or Gairdner.. maybe. Sorry, old man brain.

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  10. Really great work, A great pairing between archaeological findings and a bunch of ideas really worth wrapping your head around. that they had time to make tools and teach each other tool making to me says they had time to invent entertainment, maybe as simple as acting out what they've seen. Really, but also I'm trying to hit a character count so I can bury a joke that might be a spoiler.

    Nobody expects the Spanish Cannabalism!

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  11. I watched this as I prepared dinner for my family. It caused me to think about our ancestors preparing their own meals and finally coming together around the bonfire to eat together. No wonder families have been so important to us throughout our history. 🥲

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