- 2 days ago
Documentary, PaleoWorld PaeoWord S01E05 - Missing Links
Category
🐳
AnimalsTranscript
00:03Over a million years ago, in remote caves in China and Indonesia, our prehistoric ancestors mastered fire, shaped stone tools,
00:12and faced ferocious predators such as saber-toothed cave lions.
00:17Until recently, these ancient Asians were thought to have become a dead-end branch of the human tree.
00:24Now, controversial theories are disputing the conventional picture of modern man's origins in Africa.
01:0630 miles south of Beijing, in China's most famous archaeological site, Shokokian, or Dragon Bone Hill.
01:14In this cave, dozens of extraordinary skulls and bones have been unearthed, dating back a million years to a time
01:22when our ancestors were not yet fully human.
01:25Scientists call them Homo erectus, upright man.
01:33Although Homo erectus has also been found in Africa and Europe, anthropologists have fiercely debated for almost a century where
01:42these early Asians came from and whether they belong on our modern family tree.
01:50But they do know what Homo erectus looked like based on the skulls that have been found.
01:55Their eyes were set far apart under a massive brow ridge.
02:00Attached to the brow were thick muscles for chewing which moved the formidable jaw.
02:06The size of the jaw and the teeth, 25% bigger than our own, reveal that Homo erectus probably relied
02:13on their teeth as tools to grip and pull objects such as animal hides.
02:26Simple stone tools showed that Homo erectus was also intelligent.
02:38Skulls vary enormously in size, falling in the range of humans today.
02:44What ideas were kindled in the mind of these rugged-looking forebears?
02:48What sort of world did they face in the China of half a million years ago?
03:02Back then, much of the Earth's climate was colder and drier.
03:05The seas dropped by up to 300 feet, exposing land bridges like the Sunder Shelf that linked the Indonesian islands
03:12to mainland Asia.
03:15Much of southern Asia was covered in tropical rainforests.
03:20The discovery of extinct elephants throughout Indonesia indicate they were open areas where large animals could graze.
03:30stone tools found with Homo erectus suggest he was a hunter and would have been attracted to big game.
03:38We face stiff competition.
03:41Not only were there elephants, bears, leopards, tigers and rhinos, but also saber-toothed cats.
03:47Ferocious cave lions with huge teeth used to tear its prey apart.
03:55Many erectus bones from Asian cave sites bear gnawing marks, suggesting their owners were dragged to the cave as victims
04:03of these fierce predators.
04:07But where did these primitive humans come from?
04:10Did they originate in Asia or migrate from somewhere else?
04:13The trail of clues began in Indonesia where the very first skull of Homo erectus was found by an adventurous
04:21Dutch anatomist,
04:23Eugene Dubois, back in 1891.
04:28Prospecting for fossils along the banks of Java's Solo River,
04:31Dubois unearthed a thick skull cap which he was convinced belonged to a primitive human.
04:36At first his finds were ridiculed, so he hid the bones under the floorboards of his home in Holland.
04:43In 1936, German anthropologist Ralph von Königswald visited Dubois in Holland, examined the fossils, and decided they were authentic.
04:54Von Königswald returned to Java the following year determined to find a well-preserved Homo erectus skull, and he succeeded.
05:03This time nobody doubted that this rugged skull with its beetle brows and massive jaw belonged on the human family
05:11tree.
05:12Other skulls eventually surfaced in Europe and Africa.
05:21The most spectacular was on the shore of Kenya's Lake Turkana.
05:24On a broiling August afternoon in 1984, renowned fossil hunter Kamoya Kamu was out prospecting when he spotted a dark
05:34brown fragment of skull.
05:36It took five years for a digging team to unearth one tiny fragment after another.
05:41But eventually, they assembled a unique find, a nearly complete Homo erectus skeleton.
05:49Dubbed Turkana boy, he stood about five feet four inches tall.
05:54Yet surprisingly, he was still only 12 years old when he died.
05:58The boy's tall, athletic build is significant according to leading Homo erectus scholar, Philip Reitmeyer.
06:04That particular boy weighed perhaps 68 kilos, if he had been able to grow up.
06:11That's 150 pounds.
06:13Perhaps a good round average for early Homo erectus in East Africa was closer to 58 kilos, or about 130
06:21pounds.
06:22They were tall people also.
06:24Certainly quite comparable in those respects to us, to modern humans.
06:30Large body size would have conferred an advantage on Homo erectus in that larger people are simply able to cover
06:37more territory.
06:39Larger primates, larger mammals in comparison to smaller ones, usually behave that way.
06:46Simply cover more territory in search of food.
06:50It's likely that Homo erectus was also engaging in more hunting and consuming more meat than its predecessors had done.
06:59Meat is a highly caloric food.
07:03Homo erectus would have been able to meet its energy needs much more efficiently if it were doing some hunting
07:08on a regular, more systematic basis than had been done before.
07:14Archaeologists think Homo erectus ate more meat because they found the first well-made stone tools ideal for butchering meat
07:20at erectus sites in Africa.
07:25Once early humans knew how to make efficient tools and learned how to control fire, they were ready to leave
07:32their African cradle and colonize the rest of the world, or so archaeologists have always assumed.
07:40The conventional view is that Homo erectus originated in Africa 2 million years ago.
07:46They were the first humans to leave the continent, spreading gradually into the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
07:53But in 1994, a stunning series of discoveries through these old ideas opened the question.
08:00It raised a dramatic new possibility about Asia's earliest humans.
08:11The mystery of Asia's earliest humans first emerged at the Shokotian Caves near Beijing in the 1920s.
08:18Here emerged the fossils that quickly became celebrated as Peking men, even though many of the bones actually belonged to
08:25women and children.
08:27Archaeologist Russell Shohan specializes in Asian prehistory.
08:32When the first skull of Peking man was discovered in 1929, it generated banner headlines in newspapers around the world.
08:42Because for the first time we had truly early man in China.
08:46Earlier finds had been made in Java, but this was far north, this was in a cave context, and this
08:54also contained artifactual evidence, stone tools.
08:59None of those events happened with the finds in Java.
09:03This is what made this site so significant.
09:06One discovery created a special sensation, the evidence that they had used fire.
09:13Thick ash layers at the site of Jokotian indicate that Peking man had developed the use of fire.
09:21The use of fire was an important cultural hallmark in human evolution.
09:27It allowed the exploitation of temperate environments.
09:31The use of fire together with a varied tool kit, made up of hammer stones, choppers, points and scrapers, allowed
09:40Peking man to live in a much colder environment than any hominid had before.
09:52Another sensation was created by the theory that the bones found in the caves were the result of cannibal feasts.
09:59The idea of cannibalism at Jokotian was first proposed by the famous German anatomist Franz Weidenreich in 1940.
10:07Weidenreich couldn't explain how the bones of Peking man had gotten into the cave.
10:14In addition, upon studying those remains, he also was puzzled by the fact that there was a disproportionate number of
10:20skull remains to limb bone remains.
10:22He came up with the idea that cannibalism was responsible for this occurrence.
10:29Today, we know there are natural occurring agents that could have brought the bones into the cave, such as porcupines
10:36or large carnivores that made layers in caves.
10:39And we can also analyze the bones of Peking man for cut marks, which would have been present if cannibalism
10:46had occurred.
10:47So the issue of cannibalism and Peking man at Jokotian is now dead.
11:03Digging at Shokotian continued for over a decade from the 1920s to the 1930s.
11:09When the Japanese invaded China, the digs director, Franz Weidenreich, decided he would leave for America and take the fossils
11:17with him.
11:20The fossils arrived at the port serving Beijing on December 7th, 1941.
11:26Today, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.
11:37Casualties of war, the fossils mysteriously vanished.
11:40They were never seen again.
11:43But Weidenreich had the foresight to make plaster casts which survived.
11:4914 skulls, 15 lower jaws, and more than 200 isolated teeth, along with over 100,000 simple stone tools.
11:59And we have an extensive cultural record, consisting of scrapers, such as this one here, which was likely used to
12:10scrape out the inside of hides.
12:13And choppers, such as this one here, which was used for diggy.
12:21All of these cultural remains and fossil remains occur throughout the deposits of Jokotian.
12:29Dates of these deposits now indicate that Homo erectus spanned the time range from 400,000 years ago to 700
12:38,000 years ago at this important site.
12:42Important as the Shokotian fossils are, they are not the oldest Homo erectus fossils ever found in Asia.
12:48The quest to discover an older site led Russell Shohan and his Chinese colleagues to organize an expedition in 1991
12:55to a remote part of Sichuan province.
12:58Probing a rocky hillside overlooking the Yangtze River, the team began digging inside an ancient, collapsed cavern known as the
13:07Longhupo Cave.
13:09Eventually, they unearthed stone tools, extinct animal bones, and the lower half of a human jaw.
13:16Recently, these finds were dated to a staggering 1.9 million years, as old as the earliest known Homo erectus
13:24finds in Africa.
13:25Then, in 1994, bones from Java triggered headlines around the world.
13:31One skull from Java proved to be 1,750,000 years old, while the others were both over a million
13:37and a half.
13:38Again, the implications were shocking.
13:41Erectus in Indonesia was as ancient as any erectus in Africa.
13:45These discoveries led Shohan to a radical new theory.
13:50Now, what does this mean?
13:52If we want to take it in the perspective of these different hypotheses, we might argue that Homo erectus could
13:59have evolved in Asia and spread back into Africa,
14:03in a sense which would challenge all the conventional wisdom on the subject.
14:06By this I mean maybe the ancestor of erectus spread out of Africa two and a half million years ago,
14:15populated the rest of the old world,
14:17and then was subsequently reintroduced back into Africa at 1.7.
14:21This is a rather radical interpretation, but it is certainly a plausible one given the new dates in Asia.
14:34In fact, the new Asian dates stir up many provocative theories and questions.
14:39If Homo erectus reached China nearly two million years ago, did they evolve into us, Homo sapiens?
14:45Or was erectus in Asia a dead end and replaced by a second wave out of Africa, this time fully
14:52modern people, the ancestors of China's present population?
14:57Such questions have led to one of archaeology's fiercest debates.
15:12Half a million years ago, Homo erectus lived in these caves near Beijing, sharing the valley below with deer, horses,
15:19elephants and cave lions.
15:24Today, fossil casts of so-called Peking man are kept in the local museum, where anthropologist Russell Shohan compares the
15:32skulls of these ancient humans to our own.
15:35Here in front of us we have a typical skull of Homo erectus from Chocotien.
15:41You can see features that are distinctive. It has a very projecting brow ridge, the forehead slopes quite severely back,
15:51and it has a nuchal crest at the back.
15:55The skull is also flattened, where it is wider at the base and narrow at the top.
16:03These features are in striking contrast to what we see in modern humans.
16:07In addition to the morphological features of the skull, it has a brain size or cranial capacity roughly two-thirds
16:15that of modern humans.
16:17At first glance, one is struck by Peking man's primitive appearance.
16:23His thick brow ridges and massive jaw indicates that he still relied on his teeth, not refined tools.
16:31Can it really be true that Homo erectus belongs to our family tree?
16:44It's a tantalizing question, and the evidence of Chocotien reinforces the mystery.
16:50At one of the caves, skulls were found dating to relatively recent times, just 30,000 years ago.
16:56The bones belong to Ice Age hunters who probably spent the winter sheltering in the caves.
17:02Are they the direct descendants of Peking man and the ancestors of the modern Chinese?
17:09Physically identical to modern humans, they were definitely Homo sapiens.
17:15But did another human branch leave Africa a second time and lead to the population we see in Asia today?
17:25In the 1980s, an ingenious technique was developed to trace the genetic history of the world's populations.
17:31It involved sampling the genetic material known as mitochondrial DNA, passed down only through the female line.
17:40The results showed that all modern humans are descended from an ancestral Eve,
17:45a hypothetical mother of us all, who lived in Africa some 200,000 to 100,000 years ago.
17:54The theory caused a sensation.
17:57Recently, major flaws were exposed in the DNA Eve theory,
18:01yet archaeologists such as Philip Reitmeyer are still convinced that the fossil evidence can only be explained
18:07by a great migration of modern humans out of Africa 100,000 years ago.
18:14Certainly, some of the best evidence, as far as modern human origins are concerned, comes from Africa, particularly from the
18:23southern part of Africa.
18:24I have in mind a cave called Classy's River Mouth on the coast of South Africa.
18:32Classy's has yielded a number of human fragments.
18:35Unfortunately, the bones are rather badly broken up.
18:39There are mandibles with teeth, bits of face, bits of skull vaults, and limb bones also.
18:44These materials, insofar as we can check them, are essentially modern in their anatomy, hardly distinct from ourselves.
18:53The important point here concerns the age.
18:56Classy's has been well dated at this point through a number of lines of evidence.
19:00The first occupation at Classy's River Mouth dates right back to more than 100,000 years ago.
19:06People were resident in the cave for a time after that.
19:11This, to my mind, constitutes some of the strongest evidence we have pointing to an African origin from modern people.
19:19Reitmeyer and others think that modern humans spread out of Africa 100,000 years ago,
19:24and that their superior intelligence and technology drove Erectus and its descendants in Europe and Asia into oblivion.
19:34But these two researchers disagree.
19:37Milford Wolpuff of the University of Michigan and Alan Thorne of Australian National University are long-time collaborators.
19:44For years, they've taken a maverick position on the origin of modern humans.
19:49They deny the conventional out-of-Africa theory and argue that modern Asians evolved in a smooth, unbroken line from
19:57their ancient roots.
19:59Now, all of this took place with evolution that was within East Asia.
20:04There's no evidence at all of some new set of people coming in and replacing this whole sequence or even
20:11changing it.
20:11It is continuous. It comes up to people in Java who've got brain cases that are in the modern range.
20:19These people are just as smart as you or me.
20:21On into Australia and on into modern people and in East Asia the same thing.
20:26Now, it's a continuous evolution. It's not broken.
20:30Once people leave Africa, we don't need a second movement out of Africa.
20:34These people are evolving to modernity all by themselves in the sense that there's a local regional group.
20:41Of course, they're in contact with the rest of the human world, but we don't need anybody to replace them
20:46because they're heading in the modern direction anyway.
20:48And that's regional continuity.
20:50Put this into several places in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and in Africa, and you've got multi-regional evolution.
20:58Thorn's collaborator, Milford Walpuff, claims that the evidence from China is particularly strong in their favor.
21:05Here's the earliest specimen we know of from China. It's more than a million years old from a site called
21:10Lantian.
21:10It's an upper jaw right here, just like I'm showing on my face, teeth and a piece of cheek.
21:15And what you can see here, if you look carefully, is that the face is flat as far as the
21:20teeth and the crease is flat where the cheek comes off of the face.
21:24And it's very anterior, very much like the Chinese of today.
21:27We can find that same characteristic here in this woman from Zhoko Chen at about half the age, about 500
21:33,000 years.
21:34So what this shows is that the roots of the modern North Asians are found in people living in Asia
21:39as long ago as a million years.
21:42But many, including Reitmeyer, disagree with Walpuff's view that the ancient fossil skulls have characteristics resembling modern Asian faces today.
21:53There are a number of such characters which are cited in support of regional continuity in China.
22:00The problem is that a number of these characters are distributed into other populations spread all across the Old World.
22:08They are not limited to the Far East, certainly not just to China.
22:13The flattening of the nasal saddle, for example, actually reached their highest frequencies in African populations, well outside of the
22:21Far East.
22:22Here again, there's a pattern, but it's not the pattern that one would expect to find in support of regional
22:30continuity.
22:30For Reitmeyer, the fossil bones suggest that Homo erectus in China became isolated, a dead end outside the mainstream of
22:39human evolution, an archaic form of human swept aside by the spread of modern man during the last ice age.
22:47With so few fossils discovered over such an immense span of time, it's not surprising the experts can build conflicting
22:55visions of our human past.
22:57This is all Homo sapiens. I don't think we need Homo erectus anymore, and it would help us to see
23:03our evolution if we call them all Homo erectus.
23:06So for me, only one species of human ever leaves Africa, and that's us. That's Homo sapiens.
23:15I'd be quite happy to get rid of the name Homo erectus. It now has become a name that doesn't
23:20have anything that it clearly refers to.
23:22The fact is, is that once humans appeared as Homo, as Homo sapiens, they've been human ever since.
23:28And I think we could show that by calling them Homo sapiens from the very beginning, some two million years
23:33ago.
23:34If Wolfhoff and Thorne are right, it's extraordinary to think we can trace our origins back directly to those primitive
23:40-looking cave dwellers who had to contend with saber-toothed cats.
23:47If they're wrong, and the ancient cave dwellers were replaced by a second wave of humans from Africa, then Homo
23:54erectus went the way of the saber-toothed cats, pushed into extinction, after they had survived resourcefully, generation after generation,
24:03for millions of years.
24:06Whichever theory turns out to be correct, both represent a powerful evolutionary drama buried in our distant human past.
24:48And a wonderful nightmare.
24:55Our father is a miracle that exists now.
24:55We will be so proud of those who have seen this happen again.
25:03...the world's best-to-home reality.
25:03We will see the latest business in Japan in Japan in Japan.
25:04Also, 2022, 2022, 2022, 2022.
25:04That's the last purpose of the world.
Comments