I've been reading your work for a few years now, but only recently (today, in fact!) became a paid subscriber. As you write in the intro to this post, our ancestor populations had "tendrils [that] spanned Africa, Europe, and Asia." I'm curious, given what we know about our evolutionary history (and given what we can, perhaps, surmise or guess based on this knowledge), if you were to lead a global tour designed to tell the story of human evolution, to what places and to what sites would you take people? Let's assume this tour can't be exhaustive, and the purpose is to try to fashion some sort of coherent story of our evolutionary past for nonspecialists.
Welcome, it's great to have you subscribing, and thank you for the support! You ask a great question. I think there are two approaches to answer it.
Maybe the more fun approach is to think about the most striking places, that provide some evocative feel for what the environment and actual experiences of ancient relatives may have been. This is what I think of as "walking in the footsteps" of hominins. There are sites where we know their look at the surroundings was not too far from today's, and you can imagine almost feeling them watching you in their space. Denisova Cave is like that, not much changed in surroundings from the times that Neanderthals and Denisovans and early modern humans each were in the site. Some of the painted caves in the Dordogne are exactly like that, you go in and marks on the walls are fresh and vibrant, they could have been made yesterday.
The other way to approach this question is to dig into the different kinds of evidence that we work with, and look at sites as open books about how that evidence has been gathered. Koobi Fora today looks probably nothing like the time hominins lived there through most of the past. But understanding the pattern of fossil presence there, and seeing the limitations that archaeologists and paleontologists work with, and encountering the fossils of all the other animals that are still visible in the area, just seeing those provides a perspective that no book or film can match. Likewise, most of the Atapuerca sites basically have no resemblance today to the times hominins were present in them, but the depth of work and evidence that are visible in the sites has aspects that you cannot see in many other sites.
I'm starting my course in human evolution next week, and I'm planning to cover these aspects of sites in the first day's lecture. In that one I do go over a list of some of the greatest sites for understanding the nature of evidence. Maybe I'll be able to share something about that here.
I've been reading your work for a few years now, but only recently (today, in fact!) became a paid subscriber. As you write in the intro to this post, our ancestor populations had "tendrils [that] spanned Africa, Europe, and Asia." I'm curious, given what we know about our evolutionary history (and given what we can, perhaps, surmise or guess based on this knowledge), if you were to lead a global tour designed to tell the story of human evolution, to what places and to what sites would you take people? Let's assume this tour can't be exhaustive, and the purpose is to try to fashion some sort of coherent story of our evolutionary past for nonspecialists.
Welcome, it's great to have you subscribing, and thank you for the support! You ask a great question. I think there are two approaches to answer it.
Maybe the more fun approach is to think about the most striking places, that provide some evocative feel for what the environment and actual experiences of ancient relatives may have been. This is what I think of as "walking in the footsteps" of hominins. There are sites where we know their look at the surroundings was not too far from today's, and you can imagine almost feeling them watching you in their space. Denisova Cave is like that, not much changed in surroundings from the times that Neanderthals and Denisovans and early modern humans each were in the site. Some of the painted caves in the Dordogne are exactly like that, you go in and marks on the walls are fresh and vibrant, they could have been made yesterday.
The other way to approach this question is to dig into the different kinds of evidence that we work with, and look at sites as open books about how that evidence has been gathered. Koobi Fora today looks probably nothing like the time hominins lived there through most of the past. But understanding the pattern of fossil presence there, and seeing the limitations that archaeologists and paleontologists work with, and encountering the fossils of all the other animals that are still visible in the area, just seeing those provides a perspective that no book or film can match. Likewise, most of the Atapuerca sites basically have no resemblance today to the times hominins were present in them, but the depth of work and evidence that are visible in the sites has aspects that you cannot see in many other sites.
I'm starting my course in human evolution next week, and I'm planning to cover these aspects of sites in the first day's lecture. In that one I do go over a list of some of the greatest sites for understanding the nature of evidence. Maybe I'll be able to share something about that here.