Human beings probably originated in Africa. Four to five million years ago, Australopithecus roamed the savannahs of East Africa. This “apeman of the south” was a hominid. Around 2 million years ago, again in Africa, there appeared Homo habilis, “the handyman,” and around 1.7 million years ago Homo erectus, “the man walking erect.” Possibly Homo habilis and certainly Homo erectus can be considered as direct forebears of modern humans: they walked upright, were mainly right-handed, produced stone tools, and had harnessed fire. Whether they possessed articulate speech is uncertain. Because of the stone tools used and produced by early humans, we designate the extremely long period from the very first usage of stone tools down to about 10,000 BC as the Paleolithic, the Old Stone Age.
From 1 million years ago, Homo erectus colonized all of Africa, and large parts of Europe and Asia. Modern humans, or Homo sapiens, evolved from Homo erectus about 200,000 years ago. It is debated whether this happened independently in evolutionary processes in Africa, Asia, and Europe, or whether this was a development unique to Africa, from whence Homo sapiens some 100,000 years ago colonized the other continents in a second wave of migration out of Africa. If the last is correct, Homo sapiens must have everywhere pushed aside older types of humans, possibly because of some evolutionary asset such as superior language abilities. Anyhow, “modern” humans and less evolved types of humans such as the Neanderthal lived side by side in Europe and Asia for some 100,000 years, from 130,000 to 30,000 years ago. In the end, the Homo sapiens survived, and the other humans died out. To the arguments from skeletal evidence and tools have been added genetic ones: geneticists argued backward from part of the modern human DNA, both the Y chromosome that is exchanged between father and son, and the so-called mitochondrial DNA that is inherited in the female line only. This shows that the most recent common ancestor of the males and females of the human species lived sometime between 100,000 and 160,000 years ago, in sub-Saharan Africa. Those advocating a multi-regional evolution are not convinced. But whether humans colonized the world once or twice from Africa, when around 10,000 years
Antiquity: Greeks andRomans in Context, First Edition. Frederick G. Naerebout and HenkW. Singor. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 byJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Map 1 Colonization of the world by Homo sapiens
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Map 1 {Continued)
Ago the Ice Age was coming to an end, and with it the Paleolithic, modern humans were to be found across our planet, except for the Arctic regions, the big deserts, and Polynesia.
World History
