Human evolution; our great migrationa (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, August 19, 2022, 19:52 (609 days ago) @ David Turell

Covered in a new book:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/human-evolution-five-million-year-odyssey-review

So it’s fitting that his new book, a plain-English summary of what’s known and what’s not about the evolution of humans and our ancestors, emphasizes movement. In The Five-Million-Year Odyssey, Bellwood examines a parade of species in the human evolutionary family — he collectively refers to them as hominins, whereas some others (including Science News) use the term hominids (SN: 9/15/21) — and tracks their migrations across land and sea. He marshals evidence indicating that hominids in motion continually shifted the direction of biological and cultural evolution.

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Species from at least 4.4 million years ago or more whose hominid status is controversial, such as Ardipithecus ramidus, get a brief mention. Bellwood renders no verdict on whether those finds come from early hominids or ancient apes. He focuses instead on African australopithecines, a set of upright but partly apelike species thought to have included populations that evolved into members of our own genus, Homo, around 2.5 million to 3 million years ago. Bellwood hammers home the point that stone-tool making by the last australopithecines, the first Homo groups or both contributed to the evolution of bigger brains in our ancestors.

The action speeds up when Homo erectus becomes the first known hominid to leave Africa, roughly 2 million years ago. Questions remain, Bellwood writes, about how many such migrations occurred and whether this humanlike species reached distant islands such as Flores in Indonesia, perhaps giving rise to small hominids called hobbits, or Homo floresiensis (SN: 3/30/16). What’s clear is that H. erectus groups journeyed across mainland Asia and at least as far as the Indonesian island of Java.

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Bellwood gives considerable attention to the rise of food production and domestication in Europe and Asia after around 9,000 years ago. He builds on an argument, derived from his 2004 book First Farmers, that expanding populations of early cultivators migrated to new lands in such great numbers that they spread major language families with them. For instance, farmers in what’s now Turkey spread Indo-European languages into much of Europe sometime after roughly 8,000 years ago, Bellwood contends.

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Bellwood rounds out his evolutionary odyssey with a reconstruction of how early agricultural populations expanded through East Asia and beyond, to Australia, a string of Pacific islands and the Americas. Between about 4,000 and 750 years ago, for instance, sea-faring farmers spread Austronesian languages from southern China and Taiwan to Madagascar in the west and Polynesia in the east. Precisely how they accomplished that remarkable feat remains a puzzle.

Comment: I'm sure dhw will notice the effect of necessary food sources driving the migration. And then poo-poo the importance of humans and their food.

To buy:

https://bookshop.org/books/the-five-million-year-odyssey-the-human-journey-from-ape-to-...