Dr. Henry Gee

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130 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard Apr 2025

Dr. Henry Gee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Ancients · Rise of Humans · 6 Apr 2025 podcast

Like chimpanzees today, they would have ate all kinds of things, you know, honey from bees, insects. a bit of plants, nuts, seeds, fruits, maybe some other animals, chimpanzees, hunts and monkeys. And so they would have eaten a bit of everything. But Paranthropus became a vegetarian specialist. It had huge teeth and crunched up fibrous nuts and roots.

It's known as the robust one, isn't it, or something like that? Yes, they have been called robust Australopithecines, but they're usually classed in their own genus Paranthropus, and there were several of them. And life for them started hard and just got harder and harder. And they became extinct about half a million years ago. The other genus was Homo. That's the genus that includes ourselves.

And the first essays in the genus Homo were probably not much different from Australopithecines. In fact, some of them called Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis. There's been an argument that really these are just other Australopithecines, and I think there's a lot of merit in that. But the first of the genus Homo that really stood apart was Homo erectus.

And that originated in Africa over two million years ago. And the reason that was a different thing was it was built entirely differently. Now, all the Australopithecus and the earliest Homo, they had rather short legs and long arms compared to us. And they didn't have much of a neck. Their head was quite, you know, stuck onto the body. And they didn't have a waist.

They had kind of a bit of a pot belly. And they were good at walking about. But one thing that Homo erectus could do was run. And Homo erectus was a specialist meat eater. It was a social carnivore, much like hunting dogs, and probably behaved in the same way.

Now, a friend of mine, Dan Lieberman, and his colleague, Dennis Bramble, came up with a whole scenario of long distance running as a key feature of the development of Homo. And I'm not surprised. Dan is a very keen ultramarathon runner and runs in bare feet. And he works on human locomotion. So he's really invested in this. But it's the whole syndrome.

One thing that Homo has that you don't have except in other predators such as dogs is a ligament that holds the back of the skull to the neck. So it keeps your head up even without effort. Another thing is if you have a neck and if you have a waist, you can keep running with your arms in contra rotation to your legs. In other words, your left arm moves with your right leg and vice versa.

And you can keep your neck pointed at where you're looking at, whether it's the finish line of the marathon or the antelope you are chasing. At the same time, humans became more hairless. I mean, humans have the same amount of hair, but it's much sparser. And in between, there are sweat glands that most other animals don't have. I mean, your dogs will pant if they're hot.

And animals such as antelopes and cheetahs and that sort of thing, they can run really fast for a short distance. And then they have to stop because they become exhausted and the heat catches up with them. But humans, humans can't sprint very well compared with other animals. But humans are much better than many animals at long distance running. It's the stamina part. Yeah, it's the stamina.

It's the endurance. It's the sweating. It's the hairlessness. It's the... the fact that the human cost of transport, in other words, human walking is extraordinarily efficient. This is why just walking about won't lose you many calories, because it's very, very efficient. Running is slightly less efficient, but humans can manage it mile after mile after mile after mile. So

Hunter-gatherers, when chasing down some antelope, will chase it for a bit, and then the antelope will stop, and everyone else will stop, and they'll recover. And then the antelope goes on a bit, and the humans chase it. But the humans are relentless, and eventually the antelope will just collapse from heat exhaustion. And this is what happens in real life.

And there's also a cooperative element, because as you find in many carnivals, like lions and hunting dogs, they kind of, different individuals head them off and ambush them, and one of them flushes it out while the other one jumps on it. This would have been true for Homo erectus as well.

So the human body shape that we associate with humans today came with Homo erectus, and it seems to have been associated with a capacity for long-distance running that the earlier hominins didn't have, or at least not as well.

Homo erectus is, as far as we know, the first hominin to spread out of Africa and spread all over Eurasia. There are tools from China that are over 2 million years old. There are remains of Homo erectus-like animals or hominins in Spain that are not quite as old. Now, Homo erectus would have no concept of a continent called Africa or that it was leaving it.

What they were doing was following the game because the savannah spread all through Africa, all through southwestern Asia and into Europe, right down into Java. So they were following the savannah. So, in fact, Homo erectus was first found in Java by Eugene Dubois. It's in Southeast Asia. Yeah, it was first thought of as a giant gibbon, Pythocanthropus.

And it was only when more of the same kind were found in China that Pythocanthropus and Sinanthropus, as it was, were united into Homo erectus, and they were realized to be much more close to humans. Another thing that...

put them fairly close to humans in certainly in those days was the was the discovery that homo erectus used fire whether they just used opportunistic bits of fire and carried burning bits around or whether they had learned to actually make fire is a moot point so there's some very exciting evidence that i can't tell you about about the earliest

the earliest occurrence of fire starting as opposed to fire usage. But if I told you that, I'd have to kill you. So I can't tell you about that. Not now, not yet. Next time, Henry. But also, Homo erectus made wonderful stone tools, these teardrop-shaped stone tools called hand axes. which are found all over the Eurasia and Africa.

Some are small, some are big, and they're made of different kinds of rock, but that is the signature artifact of Homo erectus. And they may also have scratched scratches on tools, on shells. There are some shells from Eugène Dubois' excavations in Java that show signs of crosshatch scratching.

They may also have been capable of some limited watercraft because there are remains of homo erectus, homo erectus certainly there, artifacts in islands in island Southeast Asia that they could not possibly have reached over land even when there were land bridges joining them.

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