Dr. Henry Gee
speaker
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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
they were probably no better or worse living in their environment than any other human. They had to be seasoned by contact with other humans. Now, the modern view of the origin of Homo sapiens is that groups of Homo sapiens would diverge and then come together again and then diverge again throughout Africa for a very long time.
probably interbreeding with other African hominins whose existence we know very little about except in their DNA and also the occasional discovery of bones that are very recent in date but look very archaic. I mean, there's a very famous skull from Iho Eluru in Nigeria that's been known for a long time. It's only 20-something thousand years old, but it looks very, very archaic.
And there are other things like that. So there was a great deal of diversity in Africa, a huge amount of diversity. And so there were hominins interbreeding with each other to make Homo sapiens. But at the same time, Homo sapiens were starting to move out of Africa. Now, the first essays in migration in Africa were a bit of a failure.
There's Homo sapiens found in Greece that's over 200,000 years ago, but it didn't last. Also, in what is now Israel, there's the Mount Carmel Massif, where Neanderthals and modern humans tended to have a kind of timeshare arrangement with all the caves. In some caves, there are Neanderthals. In some, there are modern humans.
And what seems to be the shocker is the modern humans lived there before the Neanderthals did, and they didn't live there that long. So what happens is modern humans tried to get out of Africa, but the Neanderthals had everywhere else kind of locked up. So they didn't compete with them very well, and they probably just visited occasionally in warmer places. spells of climate.
But things change because from about 100,000 years ago, maybe slightly more, between 120,000 years ago and 50,000 years ago was quite a warm spell in the Earth's climate. And that's when modern humans in several waves came out of Africa. There were two possible routes.
One was through the Sinai Peninsula, and the other was at the other end of Arabia, the Bab el-Mandeb Straits, which might have been much narrower back in those days. But one shouldn't get the impression this was a kind of mosaic exodus. They all kind of decided to go all at once. I mean, it was dribs and drabs. Some were more dribs and drabs than others over a very long period.
But as they went, they met the other hominins, the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and who knows other ones as well. And a lot of the time, they made love, not war. So all modern humans now that do not have an exclusively African descent have about 2% Neanderthal DNA. It used to be more, but natural selection has weeded out deleterious Neanderthal mutations. And so it's about 2%.
But we can see evidence for this interbreeding really at the sharp end, because there's a bone of a modern human, a bit of skull of a modern human, about 45,000 years old, that's found in Romania, that had one Neanderthal great-grandparent. So you almost get into those hybridizations.
And these hybridizations happened, you know, they weren't often, but they happened enough to leave a strong remnant in our DNA today. So modern humans got into Europe about 45,000 years ago and drove Neanderthals to extinction within 10,000 years. Now, why they drove them to extinction is still a matter of contention.
What seems to be the most likely one is you've got to get away from the idea that this all happened all at once. It took several thousand years to happen. It took longer than recorded history to happen. What seems to have happened is that humans, modern humans, were slightly better at raising young to reproductive age than Neanderthals.
Humans were slightly less inclined to inbreed than Neanderthals. Neanderthals were very inbred. They lived in much smaller clans than modern humans. Modern humans ranged slightly further over the landscape than Neanderthals. Now, all these things at the time were probably too small to notice, but over thousands of years, these things accumulated.
So it got to a point where hominins have always lived in small groups, but the only way to keep up genetic variation and stop people becoming all the same is occasionally to swap mates with other groups. And what is true in all primates, as far as we know, is that Males tend to stay with the group they were born with, but females tend to move to other groups.
And that was true in Australopithecus. We know this from some amazing work on strontium isotopes in bones, which I won't go into. But it's also true in humans and Neanderthals. So you need that interbreeding. Clans would often meet, I guess, at times of festival to drink and swap stories and worship the great gods and also have marriage ceremonies and choose mates, and then they would move around.
But when you get to a point in Europe when there were lots and lots and lots of modern human groups and not many Neanderthal groups, the Neanderthal groups were effectively cut off. from other Neanderthal groups. So there are only two things to do, which is become extinct or interbreed with the humans. So that seems to have been the case.
It's a similar story in the rest of the world, although not nearly so well documented. It is known that humans met Denisovans and Denisovans met Neanderthals in Eastern Asia. And the same thing happened that the only the Denisovans survive today in a small percentage of DNA, mostly of people who live in Eastern and Southeastern Asia.
Papua New Guinea is a very good stronghold of modern Denisovan DNA, which is, you know, Who knows? It was just the lottery of life. The other little ones, like the hobbits, were probably driven to extinction by humans taking over their range, their resources.
Now, it's an interesting thing that the hobbits of Flores probably disappeared at about the same time that modern humans arrived there in Flores. And I have this kind of fanciful notion that folk tales of little people living in the mountains are probably folk memories of previous hominins.
Now, this is just me being completely fanciful, but I'm, as you know, a great fan of Tolkien, so I think that all the folk tales of elves, dwarves, leprechauns... the little people that lived here before us might have been a distant folk memory of other hominins that lived in the landscape before we arrived.
But by 50,000 years ago, all the hominins that had ever lived, and there were many different kinds, had died out except ours.
Showing 101–120 of 130 · page 6 of 7
← Previous
Next →