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

So Homo erectus was quite inventive and widespread, but not quite the same as us because, you know, Alan Walker and Pat Shipman in their book, The Wisdom of Bones, which is about Homo erectus. So if we looked into the eye of one, we wouldn't see a human. We'd see a savanna predator. They were very much that. They made tools, but they made tools in a quite different way than we would.

And the reason we know that is nobody knows what a hand axe is actually for. So they made hand axes in a very stereotypical way, in the same way that bees make honeycombs or birds make nests. It was a kind of intrinsic thing.

Homo erectus, well, you said earlier that, in your opinion, Homo erectus was the most successful hominin, and I would completely agree, because Homo erectus was around from 2.5 million, and the last ones probably died out, maybe 100,000, maybe even more recently in Java. So almost 2.5 million years of very successful hominins.

history, which is an incredibly long time for a mammalian species that's generally lived for only a million years. But by that time, Homo erectus had more or less retired to a comfortable retirement home in Java, and its successors were all over Europe. And some of them were big and beefy. I mean, Homo heidelbergensis, which is probably not a real species, but a kind of mishmash of other ones.

These were big people. There was a shinbone was discovered at Box Grove in Sussex, which is about the size of a large modern male shinbone, but really thick and beefy. I mean, these people could have played for the British Lions. I mean, they were big people. There were some spears, wooden spears found at Schöningen in

In Germany, about 300,000 years old, these were fence posts, and yet they were used as weapons. In East Asia, a marvelous skull was discovered quite recently. There's an amazing story about the discovery of Homo longi, or dragon man. Ah, yes. And the skull, it's only a skull in Manchuria. The skull is at least as big as a modern human.

So considering that Australopithecus was only a meter so tall and with a skull of a chimp, you know, these people were big. I mean, you know, like Genesis 6 verses 4, maybe it's Genesis 4 verse 6. I can't remember. There were giants on the earth in those days. But there was more. They were the hobbits. Homo erectus became marooned on islands in Southeast Asia.

First, it was known in Flores, which is just to the east of Java. Homo floresiensis. And in the Philippines, these creatures became very small because for reasons that nobody really quite understands, Big creatures marooned on islands become small, and small creatures marooned on islands become big.

So you have these tiny creatures less than three feet tall fighting off gigantic rats the size of dogs, and huge Komodo dragons, and tiny elephants. And the ones in the Philippines fought tiny rhinos. And they evolved to be very small, but they still made Homo erectus-like tools, only just smaller. And then there was the Neanderthals that they first appeared about 300,000 years ago.

And the first signs of them were in Spain. And they tended to be cave dwellers. And they lived in Europe and in Eurasia, as far east as Siberia. and also as far south as the Middle East. But they were cave dwellers. I think that they were built for the rugged extremes of northern Europe in the Ice Age, and they spent most of their time in caves. And they cultivated a deep inner life.

There is a remarkable circular structure in a cave in France that was made by Neanderthals. It's a structure of broken stalactites and bear skulls. that is a circle. Maybe it was the foundation of some kind of structure, but it was built in a part of the cave that would always have been away from sunlight, always in total darkness. And Neanderthals are known to have deliberately buried their dead

I mean, there are some early signs of some Neanderthal precursors in the so-called pit of bones at Atapuerca, in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain. It's a pit of bones because the residents chucked their dead ones down this pit at the back of the cave.

So that was the first sign of any kind of ceremony, because when animals die, they don't tend to notice the dead ones very much, except if they're perhaps elephants or some other intelligent creature. But Neanderthals actually deliberately buried their dead with flowers and other grave markers. With flowers? Yes, yes.

There's a very famous Neanderthal grave at Shanidar in what is now Iraq, where there's signs of concentrations of pollen, which suggests that they marked their dead with their funeral traditions. But some early Neanderthals looked up at the Tibetan plateau and thought, that looks like a nice place.

And as they climbed, they evolved into these Neanderthal cousins, the Denisovans, which are Neanderthals. As far as we know, nobody's found much. There's a bit of jaw and some teeth and some hand bones, but they're mostly known from their DNA, which has been extracted. These lived on the roof of the world, which is almost the most inhospitable place you can live, except for Antarctica.

And they evolved into these creatures, the genusophans. And we know they evolved at high altitude because... After they evolved at high altitude, they came back down again, and traces of their DNA are found in many people who live in East and Southeast Asia to this day. And a gene from Denisovans is the gene that allows modern Tibetans to breathe easily at high altitudes.

So all these Sherpas who go up and down Everest and don't get the credit, they all have these genes from Denisovans that allow them to breathe in low oxygen engines. So that was the Denisovans. So we had these Yetis, and we had the Troglodytes, and we had the Hobbits, and we had these beefy giants.

All were the heirs of Homo erectus, and so was Homo sapiens, which originated in Africa at about the same time that Neanderthals originated in Europe.

Yes. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, originated as far as we know. I mean, the dates keep being put back and back. The earliest evidence comes from Morocco, from a site called Jebel Irhoud, which has been known for a long time. And every so often, more bones and skulls are dug up.

And the latest news from Jebel Irhoud is that there were skulls of something that looked very like Homo sapiens 315,000 years ago or thereabouts. There are other similar skulls from Ethiopia that look a bit like Homo sapiens, but it has to be said that these look pretty rough ingredients. They didn't look completely like modern humans, so they were...

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