Session 9

Who are we and how did we get here?No, I'm not getting even more confused than normal....I'm introducing this week's topic, which will look broadly at human evolution and our diaspora across the planet.Following on from last week's focus on Pliocene climate change, and the start of the latest Icehouse Earth phase, here's a link that goes into some detail about the more recent climate changes that have happened: http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-climate-change-during-the-last-ice-24288097 Of course, 'more recent' is used in the geological sense here, where 80,000 years counts as not a great deal.... The picture is of a Bison carved in Russia about 20,000 years ago.An interesting question from last week was: how do they get the oxygen samples from the ocean sediment?It's one of those that sounds as if it should be simple - ha ha. This paper explains allDuring our session the class raised and discussed some very important points, like when did our evolutionary ancestors start to use tools? Does using tools define 'us' and differentiate us from animals?The earliest recognised tools are the broken pebbles made by our 'Homo Habilis' ancestor. Very difficult to distinguish from a pebble broken in any number of natural processes....And it's worth considering that wooden and small bone used as tools simply might not have survived, so the usage of tools might be considerably older than currently acknowledged.There was also a lot of discussion about the differences / similarities between H. Sapiens (modern humans) and H. Neanderthalensis (Neanderthal Man). Far from being the slouch-backed dimwit depicted in earlier reconstructions, Neanderthals are now seen as having complex social structures and having lived alongside H. Sapiens although in apparently much smaller numbers.

We're still not able to explain quite what happened to render Neanderthals extinct. In the news on the morning of this class was a piece about Neanderthals having larger eyes which meant smaller brains, therefore contributing to inability to compete. This might be the case, but it can't be the whole explanation.

Is anyone else, like me, a bit uneasy at the thought that our direct ancestors went in for an early episode of 'ethnic cleansing'?

Perhaps we can take comfort in the 2010 DNA research - this revealed that between 1% and 4% of non-African human DNA is from our Neanderthal ancestors.