origin of humans essay

Introductory essay

Written by the educator who created What Makes Us Human?, a brief look at the key facts, tough questions and big ideas in his field. Begin this TED Study with a fascinating read that gives context and clarity to the material.

As a biological anthropologist, I never liked drawing sharp distinctions between human and non-human. Such boundaries make little evolutionary sense, as they ignore or grossly underestimate what we humans have in common with our ancestors and other primates. What's more, it's impossible to make sharp distinctions between human and non-human in the paleoanthropological record. Even with a time machine, we couldn't go back to identify one generation of humans and say that the previous generation contained none: one's biological parents, by definition, must be in the same species as their offspring. This notion of continuity is inherent to most evolutionary perspectives and it's reflected in the similarities (homologies) shared among very different species. As a result, I've always been more interested in what makes us similar to, not different from, non-humans.

Evolutionary research has clearly revealed that we share great biological continuity with others in the animal kingdom. Yet humans are truly unique in ways that have not only shaped our own evolution, but have altered the entire planet. Despite great continuity and similarity with our fellow primates, our biocultural evolution has produced significant, profound discontinuities in how we interact with each other and in our environment, where no precedent exists in other animals. Although we share similar underlying evolved traits with other species, we also display uses of those traits that are so novel and extraordinary that they often make us forget about our commonalities. Preparing a twig to fish for termites may seem comparable to preparing a stone to produce a sharp flake—but landing on the moon and being able to return to tell the story is truly out of this non-human world.

Humans are the sole hominin species in existence today. Thus, it's easier than it would have been in the ancient past to distinguish ourselves from our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom. Primatologists such as Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, however, continue to clarify why the lines dividing human from non-human aren't as distinct as we might think. Goodall's classic observations of chimpanzee behaviors like tool use, warfare and even cannibalism demolished once-cherished views of what separates us from other primates. de Waal has done exceptional work illustrating some continuity in reciprocity and fairness, and in empathy and compassion, with other species. With evolution, it seems, we are always standing on the shoulders of others, our common ancestors.

Primatology—the study of living primates—is only one of several approaches that biological anthropologists use to understand what makes us human. Two others, paleoanthropology (which studies human origins through the fossil record) and molecular anthropology (which studies human origins through genetic analysis), also yield some surprising insights about our hominin relatives. For example, Zeresenay Alemsegad's painstaking field work and analysis of Selam, a 3.3 million-year old fossil of a 3-year-old australopithecine infant from Ethiopia, exemplifies how paleoanthropologists can blur boundaries between living humans and apes.

Selam, if alive today, would not be confused with a three-year-old human—but neither would we mistake her for a living ape. Selam's chimpanzee-like hyoid bone suggests a more ape-like form of vocal communication, rather than human language capability. Overall, she would look chimp-like in many respects—until she walked past you on two feet. In addition, based on Selam's brain development, Alemseged theorizes that Selam and her contemporaries experienced a human-like extended childhood with a complex social organization.

Fast-forward to the time when Neanderthals lived, about 130,000 – 30,000 years ago, and most paleoanthropologists would agree that language capacity among the Neanderthals was far more human-like than ape-like; in the Neanderthal fossil record, hyoids and other possible evidence of language can be found. Moreover, paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo's groundbreaking research in molecular anthropology strongly suggests that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans. Paabo's work informs our genetic understanding of relationships to ancient hominins in ways that one could hardly imagine not long ago—by extracting and comparing DNA from fossils comprised largely of rock in the shape of bones and teeth—and emphasizes the great biological continuity we see, not only within our own species, but with other hominins sometimes classified as different species.

Though genetics has made truly astounding and vital contributions toward biological anthropology by this work, it's important to acknowledge the equally pivotal role paleoanthropology continues to play in its tandem effort to flesh out humanity's roots. Paleoanthropologists like Alemsegad draw on every available source of information to both physically reconstruct hominin bodies and, perhaps more importantly, develop our understanding of how they may have lived, communicated, sustained themselves, and interacted with their environment and with each other. The work of Pääbo and others in his field offers powerful affirmations of paleoanthropological studies that have long investigated the contributions of Neanderthals and other hominins to the lineage of modern humans. Importantly, without paleoanthropology, the continued discovery and recovery of fossil specimens to later undergo genetic analysis would be greatly diminished.

Molecular anthropology and paleoanthropology, though often at odds with each other in the past regarding modern human evolution, now seem to be working together to chip away at theories that portray Neanderthals as inferior offshoots of humanity. Molecular anthropologists and paleoanthropologists also concur that that human evolution did not occur in ladder-like form, with one species leading to the next. Instead, the fossil evidence clearly reveals an evolutionary bush, with numerous hominin species existing at the same time and interacting through migration, some leading to modern humans and others going extinct.

Molecular anthropologist Spencer Wells uses DNA analysis to understand how our biological diversity correlates with ancient migration patterns from Africa into other continents. The study of our genetic evolution reveals that as humans migrated from Africa to all continents of the globe, they developed biological and cultural adaptations that allowed for survival in a variety of new environments. One example is skin color. Biological anthropologist Nina Jablonski uses satellite data to investigate the evolution of skin color, an aspect of human biological variation carrying tremendous social consequences. Jablonski underscores the importance of trying to understand skin color as a single trait affected by natural selection with its own evolutionary history and pressures, not as a tool to grouping humans into artificial races.

For Pääbo, Wells, Jablonski and others, technology affords the chance to investigate our origins in exciting new ways, adding pieces into the human puzzle at a record pace. At the same time, our technologies may well be changing who we are as a species and propelling us into an era of "neo-evolution."

Increasingly over time, human adaptations have been less related to predators, resources, or natural disasters, and more related to environmental and social pressures produced by other humans. Indeed, biological anthropologists have no choice but to consider the cultural components related to human evolutionary changes over time. Hominins have been constructing their own niches for a very long time, and when we make significant changes (such as agricultural subsistence), we must adapt to those changes. Classic examples of this include increases in sickle-cell anemia in new malarial environments, and greater lactose tolerance in regions with a long history of dairy farming.

Today we can, in some ways, evolve ourselves. We can enact biological change through genetic engineering, which operates at an astonishing pace in comparison to natural selection. Medical ethicist Harvey Fineberg calls this "neo-evolution". Fineberg goes beyond asking who we are as a species, to ask who we want to become and what genes we want our offspring to inherit. Depending on one's point of view, the future he envisions is both tantalizing and frightening: to some, it shows the promise of science to eradicate genetic abnormalities, while for others it raises the specter of eugenics. It's also worth remembering that while we may have the potential to influence certain genetic predispositions, changes in genotypes do not guarantee the desired results. Environmental and social pressures like pollution, nutrition or discrimination can trigger "epigenetic" changes which can turn genes on or off, or make them less or more active. This is important to factor in as we consider possible medical benefits from efforts in self-directed evolution. We must also ask: In an era of human-engineered, rapid-rate neo-evolution, who decides what the new human blueprints should be?

Technology figures in our evolutionary future in other ways as well. According to anthropologist Amber Case, many of our modern technologies are changing us into cyborgs: our smart phones, tablets and other tools are "exogenous components" that afford us astonishing and unsettling capabilities. They allow us to travel instantly through time and space and to create second, "digital selves" that represent our "analog selves" and interact with others in virtual environments. This has psychological implications for our analog selves that worry Case: a loss of mental reflection, the "ambient intimacy" of knowing that we can connect to anyone we want to at any time, and the "panic architecture" of managing endless information across multiple devices in virtual and real-world environments.

Despite her concerns, Case believes that our technological future is essentially positive. She suggests that at a fundamental level, much of this technology is focused on the basic concerns all humans share: who am I, where and how do I fit in, what do others think of me, who can I trust, who should I fear? Indeed, I would argue that we've evolved to be obsessed with what other humans are thinking—to be mind-readers in a sense—in a way that most would agree is uniquely human. For even though a baboon can assess those baboons it fears and those it can dominate, it cannot say something to a second baboon about a third baboon in order to trick that baboon into telling a fourth baboon to gang up on a fifth baboon. I think Facebook is a brilliant example of tapping into our evolved human psychology. We can have friends we've never met and let them know who we think we are—while we hope they like us and we try to assess what they're actually thinking and if they can be trusted. It's as if technology has provided an online supply of an addictive drug for a social mind evolved to crave that specific stimulant!

Yet our heightened concern for fairness in reciprocal relationships, in combination with our elevated sense of empathy and compassion, have led to something far greater than online chats: humanism itself. As Jane Goodall notes, chimps and baboons cannot rally together to save themselves from extinction; instead, they must rely on what she references as the "indomitable human spirit" to lessen harm done to the planet and all the living things that share it. As Goodall and other TED speakers in this course ask: will we use our highly evolved capabilities to secure a better future for ourselves and other species?

I hope those reading this essay, watching the TED Talks, and further exploring evolutionary perspectives on what makes us human, will view the continuities and discontinuities of our species as cause for celebration and less discrimination. Our social dependency and our prosocial need to identify ourselves, our friends, and our foes make us human. As a species, we clearly have major relationship problems, ranging from personal to global scales. Yet whenever we expand our levels of compassion and understanding, whenever we increase our feelings of empathy across cultural and even species boundaries, we benefit individually and as a species.

Get started

Zeresenay Alemseged

The search for humanity's roots, relevant talks.

Spencer Wells

A family tree for humanity.

Svante Pääbo

Dna clues to our inner neanderthal.

Nina Jablonski

Skin color is an illusion.

We are all cyborgs now

Harvey Fineberg

Are we ready for neo-evolution.

Frans de Waal

Moral behavior in animals.

Jane Goodall

What separates us from chimpanzees.

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World history

Course: world history   >   unit 1.

• History and prehistory
• Prehistory before written records
• Knowing prehistory

Homo sapiens and early human migration

• Peopling the earth
• Where did humans come from?
• Paleolithic societies
• Paleolithic technology, culture, and art
• Organizing paleolithic societies
• Paleolithic life
• The origin of humans and early human societies
• Homo sapiens , the first modern humans, evolved from their early hominid predecessors between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. They developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago.
• The first modern humans began moving outside of Africa starting about 70,000-100,000 years ago.
• Humans are the only known species to have successfully populated, adapted to, and significantly altered a wide variety of land regions across the world, resulting in profound historical and environmental impacts.

Where do we begin?

Migration and the peopling of the earth, how and why, adaptation and effects on nature, what do you think.

• Strayer, Robert W. and Eric W. Nelson, Ways of the World: a Global History (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016), 3-4.
• See "The Evolution of Humans" , Boundless.
• See Bulliet, Richard W. et. al.: _The Earth and its Peoples: A Global History (Boston, Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2011), 4-6.
• See Spodek, Howard: The World's History (New Jersey: Pearson, 2006), 5-9.
• See Bentley, Jerry H. et. al., Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2015), 8-10.
• See Melissa Hogenboom, "The first people who populated the Americas" , BBC Earth, 2017.
• See Bentley, Traditions and Encounters , 8-10.

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Human Origins

Where did we come from? Humans continue to search for the answer to this fundamental question. Over the years, we've turned to both religion and science to explain where our species came from. Innovators of their time, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, used science to explain where humans came from, posing the theory of evolution. Then, paleoanthropologists Mary and Louis Leakey explored the fossil record to see if they could piece together the story of humans. Evolutionary science and archaeology continue today. Use these materials in your classroom to teach your students about the origins of the homo sapien .

Anthropology, Archaeology, Biology, Geology, Human Geography

Encyclopedia of Humanities

The most comprehensive and reliable Encyclopedia of Humanities

Human origin

We explain human origin, and the main theories of human evolution. In addition, we explore the human species that existed, and their characteristics.

How did humans originate?

Human evolution is the evolutionary process encompassing all the biological and cultural transformations that the human species underwent leading up to modern human traits. This process is also known as hominization and is strongly linked to the "theory of evolution".

Hominids known as Australopithecus , inhabiting Africa 4 million years ago, are believed to have been the first ancestors of the human species. Subsequently, different genera of humans, (called Homo ) originated , evolved, and became extinct until the emergence of the genus Homo sapiens sapiens , to which modern humans belong.

In order to understand human evolution, interdisciplinary research is conducted across multiple disciplines, such as anthropology, genetics, paleontology, stratigraphy, geochronology, archaeology, and even linguistics.

• See also: Hominin

Theories of human origin

Throughout history, all cultures have attempted to explain human origin through myths and tales , often in relation to the creation of the world by deities. With the rise of major monotheistic religions, like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam , human origin came to be explained through religious texts that proclaimed their message as the sole truth.

From the social sciences standpoint, myths and religious stories are not sufficient explanation to account for the origin of man, which they therefore approach based on the theory of evolution .

In the 19th century, Charles Darwin wrote his book “On the Origin of Species”, in which he posited his theory of evolution. Darwin held that some individuals within each species present mutations in certain biological traits that may be naturally selected by the environment, thus favoring the survival of these individuals , which will have a greater chance of passing on the mutations to their descendants.

Today, this theory is combined with genetic research and the synthetic theory of evolution, which holds that all species are the result of the accumulation of successive changes over vast spans of time.

Human evolution was not a linear process . Archaeological evidence suggests that some species of the genus Homo , from which modern humans descend, coexisted in time, some of which became extinct while others evolved.

Origin of man

Like other living species, the human species was shaped over millions of years , through a complex process of transformations called evolution. All genera of humans that were part of this evolution are called hominids .

Scientists believe the first human ancestors were the Australopithecu s , a genus of hominids that inhabited Africa four million years ago. Australopithecus were primates, a type of mammals characterized by hands with five fingers and opposable thumbs (i.e. one finger opposing the other four, capable of grasping objects), a complex brain, central vision, and females with a monthly fertility cycle.

This group of primates also includes gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans, but these genera did not undergo the same evolutionary transformation process.

Four million years ago, the Earth experienced climatic changes, transforming the African rainforest into a savanna . This environmental change favored Australopithecus , as they were bipeds (i.e. they walked on two legs). Being bipedal freed their hands for other tasks, such as collecting fruit from the ground, gathering edible roots and tubers, and grasping sticks and stones. Furthermore, alongside with their central vision, the bipedal gait allowed them to detect the proximity of predators in the savanna environment (covered with mid-height grasses), as well as to travel longer distances over territory.

• See also: Australopithecus

Human evolution timeline

From Australopithecus evolved the genus Homo , ancestral to the different human categories that, in turn, evolved into modern humans. Human evolution was not a linear process, and different human species coexisted over time and across different regions. Over 18 different species have been identified within the genus Homo .

The following timeline broadly represents the evolutionary leaps of the human species:

• Homo habilis . They inhabited Africa 2.5 million years ago. They reached a height of 4 ft 6 in (1.40 m), and their cranial capacity was up to 700 cc. They developed speech, made tools, and built temporary shelters.
• Homo erectus . They migrated across Africa, Europe, Asia , and Oceania around 1.5 million years ago. They reached a height of 5 ft 2 in (1.60 m), and had a cranial capacity of up to 1,000 cc. They hunted small animals, lived in camps and caves, and learned to control fire.
• Homo sapiens . They inhabited Africa, Europe, Asia and Oceania. Starting 500,000 years ago, they began an evolutionary process evolving from Homo erectus. The earliest fossils of Homo sapiens as a clearly distinct species date back to 200,000 years ago. They reached a height of 5 ft 6 in (1.70 m). Their cranial capacity reached 1,500 cc, and scientists believe they had an intellectual potential equivalent to that of modern humans. They made more elaborate tools, made more complex use of language, and buried their dead.
• Homo neanderthalensis . They inhabited Europe and Asia from around 230,000 years ago until 30,000 years ago. They were hunters and lived in larger groups. Scientists initially categorized the earliest fossil remains of homo neanderthalensis as a distinct genus homo. Nowadays, however, they are classified as a subspecies within the genus Homo sapiens . In the later period, they coexisted with Homo sapiens sapiens , direct ancestor of modern humans. The reasons for their extinction remain unknown.
• Homo sapiens sapiens . They inhabited Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and the Americas. It is the species to which modern humans belong. The oldest fossil remains date back to around 2,000 years ago. They mastered group hunting techniques on large animals, practiced religious rites, and represented reality in paintings and sculptures.
• See also: Human evolution

Characteristics of human evolution

The main biological mutations that marked human evolution include:

Opposable thumbs

Cerebration.

The most significant cultural aspects of human evolution include:

Emergence of language

• Symbolic representation

The upright posture on the hind limbs would have arisen for more efficient mobility across the African savannas . This would have allowed early hominids to run at faster speeds and to keep a vantage point above tall grasses, which could potentially hide predators.

Individuals walking on two legs had a better chance of survival compared to those relying on all four . Over time, this trait became predominant, leading to anatomical changes positioning the skull firmly on top of the spine.

As hominids began to walk upright, their upper limbs were freed , meaning they no longer needed them to move from one place to another. This allowed them to use their hands for other tasks, such as eating while walking, holding their offspring while escaping from predators, carrying food, or using tools.

Stones, bones, and pieces of wood were among the early tools that our ancestors had. These rudimentary tools mark the beginning of a technological journey leading up to the sophisticated tools we have today.

As we progress in the lineage of pre-human hominids, there is a noticeable increase in cranial capacity : from the 350 cc of the earliest Australopithecus to the 1,200 to 1,400 cc of Homo sapiens .

This growth in brain volume suggests a heightened ability for more complex cognitive processes , broader and deeper reasoning, and faster thought processes. Furthermore, it allowed for enhanced learning and abstraction, a defining feature that distinguishes us from other animals.

While communication is a common trait to all life forms, language is distinctly human .

Some animals can understand and associate certain instructions regarding desired or undesired behaviors. Others, like chimpanzees, are able to comprehend certain communication basics through sign language.

However, in none of these cases is it an articulate language. A system based on sounds and signs transformed into complex ideas is unique to our species.

Art and culture

The most sophisticated forms of culture and artistic expression among all the human species that ever existed were achieved by Homo sapiens . Nevertheless, some ancestors also left traces of their existence . In addition, Neanderthals are thought to have left cave art and other forms of prehistoric art.

In our civilization, art and culture are a reflection of our thinking skills , of our expressive and creative spirit. Moreover, they are a highly valued aspect of our existence, something unique among all forms of animal life.

Explore next:

• Prehistoric man
• López Serrano, A. (1996). Proceso de hominización y cultura material. La aportación de la antropología histórica.
• Harris, M. (1981). Introducción a la antropología general . Alianza.
• Leakey, R., & Lewin, R. (1994). Nuestros orígenes . RBA editores.
• “Evolución humana”. Wikipedia .
• “Evolución del hombre”. Profe en Historia .
• “The Evolution of Humans” (video). FuseSchool – Global Education .
• “Los conceptos básicos de la evolución humana”. National Geographic .
• “Introduction to Human Evolution”. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History .
• “Human evolution”. The Encyclopaedia Britannica .

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March 1, 2024

The Origin and Legacy of the Human Age

Whether we live a million more years or another week is up to us

By Andrea Gawrylewski

Scientific American

It has never been a certainty that humans would survive on Earth. We've probably faced extinction several times in our evolutionary past, according to genetic analysis. In the past few years a global pandemic killed millions, the hottest months in human record baked much of the world, and thought leaders signed a global petition to rein in powerful (and potentially harmful) artificial-intelligence technology. These challenges remind us that there are no guarantees. And yet we are a species to be reckoned with. We have accomplished a great deal in our relatively short time here—extended our life spans, made startling discoveries about our environment and ourselves, harnessed resources to improve our quality of life, and developed rich histories of art and culture. The human legacy on Earth is unparalleled.

How did we get here? It turns out that our evolutionary story is not a linear progression from ape to human. Each fossil discovery adds to the messy tangle that is the path leading to Homo sapiens . Our large brains helped to solve the complex problem of primitive survival , and interpersonal relationships and altruism might have given us a strong advantage over other hominins . Both male and female ancestors shared the duties of hunting , according to new analyses.

And what a world we've created together . We've built a behemoth financial system, established global communication and trade networks, and unleashed information technology. The benefits of those systems are not evenly distributed, however, leaving many lacking basic resources and health care . Now some economists have started to wonder whether we're using the proper tools to measure the true success of a society. Our life expectancy has more than tripled over the course of our two-million-year story. At the same time, growing inequality and poor future planning will undoubtedly give rise to new threats to health and longevity .

On supporting science journalism

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Human progress has had a measurable impact on the ground we walk, even down to the layers of concrete, plastics and nuclear waste we leave behind— indelible enough to mark a new geological era . Glacial melting is happening faster than scientists predicted just a few years ago, a harbinger of change to come. That change will have disproportionate effects because the burden of environmental degradation is carried by the world's impoverished and oppressed peoples .

The ingenuity that launched us to the top of the food chain could also fast-track major improvements. Cities, which house more than half of the global population, might become hotbeds of sustainable solutions that cut down on both resource consumption and pollution . And rural communities that manage their own food production and wealth locally are likely to end up more self-sufficient and in harmony with the natural world .

Of course, this story is far from over. Humans are an exceptional species . Whether we live a million more years or another week is entirely up to us. Whatever we choose as our legacy on Earth, it will be fueled by tenacious human creativity.

• ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE
• Open access
• Published: 29 July 2010

Human Origins Studies: A Historical Perspective

• Tom Gundling 1  

Evolution: Education and Outreach volume  3 ,  pages 314–321 ( 2010 ) Cite this article

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Research into the deep history of the human species is a relatively young science which can be divided into two broad periods. The first spans the century between the publication of Darwin’s Origin and the end of World War II. This period is characterized by the recovery of the first non-modern human fossils and subsequent attempts at reconstructing family trees as visual representations of the transition from ape to human. The second period, from 1945 to the present, is marked by a dramatic upsurge in the quantity of research, with a concomitant increase in specialization. During this time, emphasis shifted from classification of fossil humans to paleoecology in which hominids were seen as parts of complex evolving ecosystems. This shift is in no small part due to the incorporation of neo-Darwinian synthetic theory. Finally, technological innovation and changes in social context are considered as influences on human origins studies.

Introduction

Considering the grand sweep of history, the realization that human beings gradually evolved from some non-human ancestor represents a very recent insight. Even so, the goal of this one brief essay cannot be to provide an in-depth description and analysis of every significant development within the field of paleoanthropology, but rather to identify broad patterns and highlight a collection of “events” that are most germane in shaping current understanding of our evolutionary origin. These events naturally include the accretion of fossil material, the raw data which is the direct, if mute, testimony of the past. These fossil discoveries are situated among technological breakthroughs, theoretical shifts, and changes in the sociocultural context in which human origins studies were conducted. It is only through such a contextualized historical approach that we can truly grasp our current understanding of human origins. Foibles of the past remind us to be critical in assessing newly produced knowledge, yet simultaneously we can genuinely appreciate the enormous strides that have been made.

In addition to selective coverage, a second caveat is that this review will focus on research by scientists writing in English. Non-modern hominids Footnote 1 are a cosmopolitan bunch, having been discovered throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, and there is a significant literature in other languages. In an effort to ameliorate both of these shortcomings, numerous secondary references are included in the bibliography, providing more in-depth information on specific topics. For example, some texts approach the history of paleoanthropology by detailing a single time period (Bowler 1986 ), early human species (Walker and Shipman 1996 ), or researcher (Morell 1995 ), and there are quite a few that consider the subject more comprehensively (Leakey and Goodall 1969 ; Reader 1988 ; Lewin 1997 ; Tattersall 2008 ). In addition, there are a handful of encyclopedia format tomes (Jones et al. 1994 ; Spencer 1997 ; Delson et al. 2000 ), textbooks (Conroy 2005 ; Cela-Conde and Ayala 2007 ; Klein 2009 ), and “coffee table” popular volumes (Stringer and Andrews 2005 ; Johanson and Edgar 2006 ) that in part address the history of human origins studies. Moreover, these texts contain abundant references to the primary literature if that level of scrutiny is desired.

In seeking to provide a useful heuristic framework for the purposes of this particular essay, human origins studies can be broken down into two very broad periods. The first is roughly the century between 1850 and 1950 when research, often conducted by individuals with training outside of anthropology, focused on taxonomy and phylogeny. In other words, although scientists were cognizant that climate change (e.g., northern hemisphere glaciations) would have directly impacted the evolution of early humans, they were mainly interested in collecting “missing links,” naming them, and creating family trees. The second period, from 1950 to the present, is characterized by the relatively rapid development of paleoanthropology as it is currently practiced. Here the emphasis is only partly on the hominids themselves, with ecological context being of equal importance.

The Emergence of Human Origins Studies

This review begins with two mid-nineteenth century developments which are often conflated, but were initially distinct. The first is the acceptance of a temporal association of human material culture (stone tools), with extinct Ice Age mammals (Van Riper 1993 ; Sommer 2007 ). This was significant in that it opened up a considerable prehistory for the human species, well beyond estimates derived from literal scriptural interpretation. However, while acknowledging a lengthy antiquity for the human species, there was, at the time, no reason to suspect that the makers of the stone tools were not fully modern humans in a biological sense. The second major development was the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 (Darwin 1859 ). Darwin is rightfully credited with being the most influential, although by no means the first individual to broach the subject of descent with modification, or transmutation theory, as he put it (for an overview of pre-evolutionary ideas related to human origins, see Greene 1959 , Bowler 2003 ). Darwin’s central thesis was that all living species shared a common ancestry, with “endless forms most beautiful” having diverged via natural selection, and although he only briefly mentioned his own species the inference was clear. These two events dovetailed into the now quotidian, but then controversial, notion that humans had evolved over a vast expanse of time (Grayson 1983 ).

While Darwin was initially reticent to discuss human evolution in any detail, his colleague Thomas H. Huxley harbored no such reluctance when he published Man’s Place in Nature: Essays in 1863 (Huxley 1900 ). Darwin freely admitted that the veracity of his audacious proposal would have to withstand paleontological scrutiny and that his theory would collapse in the absence of transitional fossil forms. Huxley’s advantage, beyond his more outspoken personality, was that he actually had a fossil human to describe. The first Neandertal recognized by science was discovered in 1856; however, its description only appeared in English three years later, just as Darwin was going to press (Trinkaus and Shipman 1993 ). Huxley provided a detailed description of the eponymous cranium coupled with carefully composed line drawings (Huxley 1900 ). However, while the importance of the Neandertals in providing empirical evidence documenting an ancient and morphologically distinct human form cannot be discounted, these people hardly bridged the gap separating humans and the great apes. Although a few dissenting voices denied the close evolutionary relationship among humans and the “man-like” apes, and consequently an ape phase of human ancestry, most scientists accepted the overwhelming morphological and embryological evidence in support of just such a relationship. This acceptance was in no small part due to Huxley’s meticulous comparison of gorilla and human anatomy in which he concluded that the gorilla and its close relation, the chimpanzee, represented the nearest approach to humanity in nature.

If Neandertals were more or less human, then more distant, primitive “missing links” remained to be discovered. Just such fossils were recovered on the island of Java in the 1890s by Dutch physician Eugene Dubois, who had traveled to Indonesia as part of the army but with the express purpose of finding the remains of primitive humans (Shipman 2001 ). Java Man consisted of a skull cap, a femur, and a few isolated teeth which taken in combination suggested an early human with a much smaller cranial capacity relative to Neandertals or Homo sapiens (roughly 1,000 vs. 1,500 cubic centimeters), although the femur appeared modern. Dubois did not receive the universal accolades and acceptance he coveted, but his fossils bolstered the conventional wisdom at the time that humans first evolved somewhere in Asia.

During the early twentieth century, the early hominid fossil record grew significantly, if not exponentially, and evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles even while large segments of the lay public remained skeptical. Certainly, there were disagreements over whether natural selection was a sufficient evolutionary mechanism in itself (Bowler 1983 ), but the basic premise of biological change through time was affirmed. The recovery of additional Neandertal remains in Europe refuted lingering claims of pathology regarding the original Neander Valley specimen and solidified the interpretation that the latter was representative of a population of archaic humans occupying Ice Age Europe. Some Neandertal remains were interpreted as not only indicating intentional internment but also associated funerary ritual. The European fossil record was extended significantly with the recovery of a robust lower jaw from Mauer, Germany discovered in 1907.

In 1912 in England, heretofore devoid of non-modern hominid remains despite the prominence of several British scholars in human origins studies, the announcement of hominid fossils from Piltdown was warmly received locally, if with some incredulity abroad. Piltdown was significant since it reified the “brain first” hypothesis, in which primitive humans evolved a large brain before other key human traits evolved. Although a favorite of intelligent design creationism advocates, Piltdown is actually a beautiful example of the scientific method at work, whereby new evidence eventually calls into question prior interpretation, and in this case recognition of intentional fraud (Spencer 1990 ). It was, after all, a new relative dating method measuring the fluorine content of fossils that in 1953 exposed the non-contemporaneity of the jaw and skull. In any case, in the first decades of the twentieth century, a fairly simple human family tree was beginning to emerge (see McCown and Kennedy 1972 and especially Delisle 2007 for exceptions). Relatively small-brained Pithecanthropus led to the more capacious Neandertals and Piltdown, who in turn evolved into modern H. sapiens . Yet the truly ape-like human ancestors remained elusive.

Africa as the Cradle of Humanity

In 1921 a skull bearing superficial resemblance to European Neandertals was recovered as part of mining operations at a place called Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Rhodesian Man marks the recovery of the first in a very long line of non-modern hominids from the African continent. A mere four years later, University of Witwatersrand anatomist Raymond Dart, Australian by birth and having been trained in England, published a brief paper describing the fossil skull of a juvenile “ape” discovered in a limestone quarry near Taung, South Africa. Dart identified certain features of the face, the teeth, the cranium, and the brain of Australopithecus africanus that foreshadowed those of H. sapiens and made the startling claim that what was essentially a bipedal ape signaled the beginning of the human lineage separate from the African great apes.

Initially, with only the one individual, and a juvenile at that, Dart found little support. His most ardent advocate, Scottish physician and paleontologist Robert Broom discovered additional fragmentary remains of the australopithecines, as they were then called, in other South African caves in the 1930s, but these were initially insufficient to sway opinion (Dart 1959 ). This was perhaps due to the near-simultaneous discovery of significant hominid remains from Zhoukoutien (Dragon Bone Hill) in China which quickly eclipsed whatever controversy the diminutive skull from Taung elicited, and despite Broom’s ongoing efforts. As was the case with Java Man, the more complete Chinese fossils fulfilled the expectations of many scientists who anticipated that earliest human ancestors evolved to the East. Comparative analysis of the Javanese and Chinese fossils revealed a great deal of similarity, and all of the fossils were ultimately subsumed in the species Homo erectus .

The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis and the New Physical Anthropology

For several disparate reasons, the decades following the end of World War II (WWII) rather quickly led to a science of paleoanthropology that is recognizably modern. One significant factor relevant in the U.S. if not everywhere, was the dramatic upsurge in enrollment at colleges and universities. The G.I. Bill and subsequent effects of Civil Rights legislation that greatly increased access to higher education meant that millions more students went to college and hence the expansion of existing campuses and programs and in some cases the appearance of entirely new colleges and universities Footnote 2 . As a result, greater numbers of faculty were required who could teach courses and supervise research in diverse academic programs, which in turn led to an attendant rise in the numbers of graduate students themselves who went on to secure positions at institutions of higher learning. Consequently, many disciplines experienced significant increases in research activity, including physical anthropology, and it is worth noting that this was the first generation of researchers whose formal training was in physical anthropology, not in some allied field such as anatomy or medicine. The dramatic rise in practitioners not only increased the knowledge base in terms of simple quantity, but specialization within the field also began to emerge.

A second crucial development that transformed human evolutionary studies was theoretical in nature. Changing ideas regarding the process of evolution had been fermenting and roiling in biology circles for several decades before they infiltrated the study of human origins. In essence, a consensus was reached among biologists ( sensu lato ) that Darwinian natural selection acting on variation arising from random mutation was a sufficient mechanism to explain evolutionary change. For anthropologists, although questions of taxonomy and phylogeny remained important, the intellectual fallout of the so-called neo-Darwinian synthesis led to the “New Physical Anthropology” in which early hominid fossils, rather than representative of some platonic archetype, were interpreted as unique members of variable populations. Focusing on evolution as a process effecting change in populations over time, in contrast to the comparatively myopic sorting of the resulting pattern , arguably represents the most significant theoretical shift in thinking about evolution since Darwin.

Given the comparative de-emphasis on iconic types, the bloated alpha taxonomy of the past was reduced to a mere handful of hominid species displaying previously under-appreciated within species variability. This great reduction in hominid names and consequent simplification of hominid family trees has led some modern scholars to lament what they see as a return to the bad old days of teleology and orthogenesis. Yet there can be little doubt that the “splitting” taxonomic philosophy of the past where almost every new specimen received a new species or quite frequently a new genus name was in dire need of revision.

Just as species types came under scrutiny, so did the concept of evolutionary grades which had up to this point made clear distinctions between the categories of ape and human. While this may have provided some welcome taxonomic clarity, it was artificial in that it ignored the evolutionary reality that at some point members of the human lineage were very ape-like. This realization, obvious in retrospect, led to the widespread acceptance of the South African australopithecines as human ancestors, and the important corollary that bipedalism preceded other distinctive human attributes (Gundling 2005 ).

In addition to increased research activity and theoretical shifts, by the early 1960s technological innovations for the first time permitted the creation of a reliable absolute timescale of human evolution. Comparative protein analysis demonstrated that the African apes were most similar genetically to H. sapiens , inferring their recent common ancestry to the exclusion of other apes and monkeys. Molecular clocks based upon mutation rates and calibrated by the fossil record suggested that this common ancestor lived as little as a few million years ago, although recent estimates put this ancestor at seven to five million years ago. Consequently, known early and middle Miocene ape species became suspect as purported human ancestors, since they preceded the split between the hominid and great ape lineages. Most notably this eventually led to the downfall of Ramapithecus , a Miocene ape genus once widely hailed as a very ancient and very primitive hominid Lewin ( 1997 ).

While molecular studies of living species effectively imposed a theoretical maximum on the age of the hominid lineage, the temporal framework of human origins was further clarified with the introduction of the new potassium argon (K-Ar) method of absolute dating. Louis and Mary Leakey had been scouring the fossil-bearing sediments in and around eastern Africa’s Great Rift Valley for decades when Mary discovered the skull of a robust australopithecine at Olduvai Gorge in 1959. Significantly, Zinjanthropus , the genus coined for the new skull, was discovered within sediments near the base of the Pleistocene Epoch. Volcanic minerals from associated strata were dated to approximately 1.75 million years ago using the K–Ar method, nearly double the age estimated from using other more crude means. This greatly expanded time range certainly bolstered claims for the australopithecines as human ancestors rather than extinct collateral cousins to the “true” human lineage, yet to be discovered.

As an aside, Louis Leakey’s interest in understanding the human past was not limited to the collection of fossils. Sherwood Washburn, a main architect of the new physical anthropology, along with Irven DeVore, conducted pioneering studies of savanna baboons, large-bodied, terrestrial, and highly social primates that served as living proxies for modeling early hominid behavioral ecology (Washburn and DeVore 1961 ). Leakey, on the other hand, took a more phylogenetically based approach and hired scholars to conduct research into the behavior of the great apes as a potential new data source informing hypotheses of early hominid behavior. Jane Goodall was the first, studying chimpanzee behavior at Gombe in Tanzania, then came Dianne Fossey who undertook a longitudinal study of mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and finally Birute Galdikas traveled to Indonesia to conduct field studies of the orangutan (see Kinzey 1987 and De Waal 2001 for more recent primate studies that explicitly address questions of human behavioral evolution).

The emergence of paleoanthropology as a truly multidisciplinary endeavor, concerned with a more holistic picture of our evolutionary past, was a logical extension of the post-WWII new physical anthropology which eschewed simple classification and promoted variable populations as the unit of study. Naturally, these hominid populations did not exist in a vacuum but were components of complex, evolving ecosystems. Hence, field work began to emphasize the collection of greater contextual data in an effort to reconstruct biological and physical environments in which these human ancestors existed and evolved. One of the first field projects to adopt this new approach was an international expedition centered around the Omo River Valley in southern Ethiopia, beginning in 1967. Remarkably, of the 50 papers collected in the resulting volume, only five primarily focus on the hominid remains themselves (Coppens et al. 1976 ).

Early Human Diet and Subsistence

One major aspect of early hominid ecology that occupied researchers engaged in such multidisciplinary efforts was subsistence, which has understandably been of great interest to paleoanthropologists, particularly after 1950 as scientists endeavored to contextualize the fossil remains of distant ancestors. What early humans ate, how food was acquired and processed, even how it was distributed among members of a social group, became viable questions. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s it was widely assumed that the social, cognitive, and technological skills associated with big-game hunting drove the evolution of the human species; in fact the allure of “Man the Hunter” is longstanding in Western thought (Cartmill 1993 ). Raymond Dart, as part of his second foray into human origins studies, proposed that Australopithecus had already developed a hunting strategy facilitated by a technology comprised of durable animal parts that he referred to as the osteodontokeratic (bone, tooth, horn) culture. This concept was enthusiastically embraced by writer Robert Ardrey, who published a series of four popular novels documenting the success of these “killer apes” in the context of a changing environment (e.g., Ardrey 1976 ). Research scientists were only slightly less enthusiastic in championing such ideas (Lee and DeVore 1968 ) which remain popular, if more nuanced today (Wrangham and Peterson 1996 ).

Mirroring changes in the broader society, by the early 1970s some anthropologists challenged the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis and developed an alternative that focused on the central role of women in child rearing and gathering of food resources (Dahlberg 1981 ). These studies used ethnographic data from extant food-foraging societies, the rarity of which injected a sense of urgency on the part of anthropologists. Not long after the “Women the Gatherer” model appeared as a second wave feminist rejoinder to the previously unquestioned authority of “Man the Hunter,” another group of researchers also began to question the big-game hunting scenario. Archeologists, geologists, and paleontologists began working on “site formation processes” to get a better understanding of how assemblages of fragmented animal bones and stone tools came to be commingled. Over the next few decades, often with recourse to modern ecosystems as analogs, one of the main conclusions drawn from the new science called taphonomy (=laws of burial) was the potential importance of scavenging. The association of “bones and stones” was no longer assumed to be the signature of hominid big-game hunting but instead interpreted as meals containing essential fat and protein scavenged by early humans. Perhaps even more disconcerting, some sites were reinterpreted as the remains of carnivore kills occasionally including early humans themselves (Brain 1981 ; Hart and Sussman 2008 ).

Here’s Lucy

If Mary and Louis Leakey’s discoveries at Olduvai put the Great Rift Valley on the map, during the 1970s eastern Africa was validated as the center of early hominid studies. The Leakey’s son Richard established himself on the east side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, where his expeditions uncovered a prolific cache of early hominid fossils, some of which corroborated the occasionally controversial claims made by his parents a decade earlier. Sediments around the lake yielded hominid fossils of robust australopithecines, early members of genus Homo , and an early African variant of Asian H. erectus , these days referred to as Homo ergaster (Leakey and Lewin 1978 ). The latter includes a mostly complete skeleton, KNM-WT15000, which has become iconic for the species (Walker and Shipman 1996 ).

Arguably the most significant fossil discovery of the 1970s was another partial skeleton, AL-288, from Hadar, Ethiopia, better known as Lucy (Johanson and Edey 1981 ). Here was a single individual represented by numerous skeletal elements, and although her morphology was generally similar to the “gracile” australopithecines of South Africa, she was even more primitive in some respects. Consequently her discoverers coined a new species name, Australopithecus afarensis that included not only the Hadar specimens but fossils collected by Mary Leakey’s expedition at Laetoli in Tanzania. The latter is renowned for its famous footprint trail preserved in solidified volcanic ash, imparting convincing evidence for bipedalism at 3.6 million years ago. Hadar is also replete with datable volcanic sediments, and Lucy’s status as the most primitive hominid was reinforced by firm radiometric dates which placed the fossils at greater than 3.0 million years ago, at the time astonishingly ancient.

One other significant event from the 1970s bears mentioning. Although the American Journal of Physical Anthropology was first published in 1918, it is perhaps surprising that a journal explicitly dedicated to the study of human evolution did not appear in the U.S. until 1972. Since then the Journal of Human Evolution has been the premier academic forum for publications related to human evolution, and in 1992, the Paleoanthropology Society was established, which organizes its own conference and publishes an online journal.

Modern Human Origins

The question of modern human origins has been debated for centuries, long predating paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline. One of the central issues, which became particularly evident as Renaissance and Enlightenment Europeans began to travel the globe on a regular basis, was how to explain the physical diversity of human populations. Two broad perspectives emerged, one which viewed all people as having a single origin and another which believed that supposedly distinct races had separate origins. The pre-Darwinian debates between so-called monogenists and polygenists were recast with the advent of an evolutionary paradigm in the mid-nineteenth century. Within this new theoretical context, monogenists believed that all living humans evolved from a common ancestor that was already H. sapiens , while the polygenists believed that the races had deeper roots and had descended from different non-modern ancestors (e.g., H. erectus or in a few instances different ape species). A major step towards resolving this debate came in 1987 with an analysis of living human mitochondrial DNA diversity which concluded that H. sapiens had a recent African origin. The discovery of essentially modern human fossils at the 160,000-year-old site of Herto, Ehtiopia, provides paleontological support for a recent African origin, and many subsequent genetic studies have supported this basic conclusion. However, the possibility of some gene flow between migrating early modern humans and local archaic populations remains plausible (compare Stringer and McKie 1996 and Wolpoff and Caspari 1998 , also see Relethford 2003 for a geneticist’s perspective).

Conclusion: Twenty-First Century Paleoanthropology

New fossil discoveries, technological innovations, theoretical advances, and social transformations will continue to inform knowledge of our deep past. Recovery of hominid fossils, some from previously unknown time periods and geographic locations, continues at a brisk rate. Many of the most significant recent discoveries are beginning to fill in the crucial African late Miocene time period during which our lineage ramified from that leading to the chimpanzee (Gibbons 2006 ). Of particular note, one of these fossils was discovered in Chad, quite a distance from established sites in the Great Rift Valley, challenging the long standing hypothesis that hominids evolved in the savanna grasslands of eastern Africa while the African ape ancestors remained sequestered in their tropical rainforest refugium. Moreover, botanical, faunal, and geological evidence associated with very early fossil hominids in Ethiopia and Kenya intimate a forested environment, a discovery that clearly constrains hypotheses explaining the success of the bipedal adaptation.

Other significant fossil discoveries from the early Pleistocene site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia have energized discussion of the initial expansion of early humans beyond the tropics of Africa (Wong 2006 ). Not only are these fossils considerably older than prior known Eurasian specimens, but they are morphologically primitive, especially in terms of stature and cranial capacity, and are associated with very simple (“mode 1”) lithic technology. These early migrants hardly manifest the tall striding bipeds equipped with comparatively advanced Acheulian bifacial tools so often depicted in earlier “out of Africa” scenarios Footnote 3 , which are at least in part based on the iconic WT15000 skeleton mentioned earlier.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery of the last decade is the diminutive 18,000-year-old skeleton from the Indonesian island of Flores, which has sparked a spirited, occasionally acrimonious debate between those advocates of a replacement model of modern human origins and those inclined towards regional continuity (Morwood and van Oosterzee 2007 ). The former, comprised of the team who made the discovery and their allies, interpret the remains as those of a surprisingly primitive hominid akin to early Homo , and perhaps the first documented example of the effects of island dwarfing on an early human population. Other scholars believe the remains to be those of a pathological modern human, whose illness resulted in a cascade of skeletal and dental anomalies. Ongoing research on Flores and other nearby locations will undoubtedly resolve this debate.

New discoveries are not limited to the paleontological record but also include behavioral information gleaned from archaeology. Symbolic expression in the form of language, art (including music), and religion is undoubtedly one of the most distinctive human traits. Evidence for such behavior has proved elusive beyond the seeming cultural explosion perceived in the Upper Paleolithic of Europe beginning around 35,000 years before present. However, archeological evidence for at least some of these behaviors has recently been coaxed out of several sites in sub-Saharan Africa. Advanced utilitarian objects such as blades and harpoons have been recovered well back into the Middle Stone Age and use of ochre and shells for body adornment has been found at sites approaching 100 kiloannum (Balter 2009 ).

Recent advances also include a plethora of technological innovations that have allowed anthropologists to hone traditional inquiries in the areas of dating (e.g., single crystal, laser fusion, argon–argon dating), systematic analysis (e.g., geometric morphometrics), and paleoenvironmental reconstruction (e.g., stable isotope analysis). The badly distorted remains of the spectacular 4.4 megaanum skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus from Aramis, Ethiopia was restored in part using digital imaging technology (Gibbons 2009 ). Additionally, new technology is facilitating, perhaps even driving, novel questions such as those related to the emergence of the unique human life history pattern.

While fossils provide real-time evidence for human evolution, signals from our ancient past are also encoded into our modern DNA. The groundbreaking work of the 1960s effectively demonstrated our close affinity with the African great apes, and today’s genomic analyses comparing humans and chimpanzees are beginning to reveal differences in much finer detail than heretofore possible. Already several areas within the human genome have been identified as having undergone intense selection; these regions may be related to the evolution of the especially dexterous human thumb, reduction of muscles of mastication in the wake of the ability to cook food, the greatly enlarged neo-cortex, and our ability for spoken language.

In addition to modern DNA analyses, ancient DNA analysis has informed the “Neandertal problem” providing preliminary evidence in support of the replacement hypothesis, at least in Europe, whereby modern humans arriving there equipped with Upper Paleolithic technology drove the indigenous Neandertals to extinction. Even more recent genomic analyses, however, suggest that a small but detectable degree of interbreeding occurred when expanding modern human populations emerging from the African tropics encountered Neandertal populations in the Middle East around 120,000 years before present (Gibbons 2010 ).

In conclusion, our understanding of human origins, like all scientific knowledge, is the result of an ongoing, iterative process. Over the last few decades, the accelerating pace of fossil discoveries and the incorporation of innovative technologies have corroborated and enhanced much of what we already suspected to be true, although there have been a few surprises. No doubt this pattern will continue into the foreseeable future as we slowly, yet inexorably, piece together the circumstances by which our lineage became human.

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Gundling, T. Human Origins Studies: A Historical Perspective. Evo Edu Outreach 3 , 314–321 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12052-010-0248-7

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8 (page 146) p. 146 The origin of humans

• Published: November 2008
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‘The origin of humans’ begins by looking at the first primates and mammals and the three modern orders that originated in the Jurassic and Cretaceous — the monotremes, marsupials, and placentals. Recent molecular phylogeny reconstruction methods have assisted in the understanding of the relationships of the major groups of living placentals resulting in three major clades: Afrotheria (elephants, hyraxes, and sirenians), Xenarthra (South American placentals and edentates), and Boreoeutheria (‘northern mammals’). The evolution of basal primates; horses from the tiny Hyracotherium ; rhinos from the giant Indricotherium ; monkeys; apes; and finally, of human beings from the australopithecines of East Africa to modern-day Homo sapiens are described.

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Human Origin 101

The story of human evolution began about 7 million years ago, when the lineages that lead to Homo sapiens and chimpanzees separated. Learn about the over 20 early human species that belong in our family tree and how the natural selection of certain physical and behavioral traits defined what it means to be human.

Anthropology, Archaeology, Geography

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Related Resources

What’s So Bad About Asking Where Humans Came From?

Human origin stories have often been used for nefarious purposes. That doesn’t mean they are worthless.

Here is an origin story about origin stories. Once upon a time, we knew where we came from: Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Fall. Then came modern science, modern doubt. Geology, paleontology: The world grew older very fast. Skulls were discovered, and stone tools. Human origins became a problem and a fascination. Who are we? How did we emerge? And given who we think we may be, how should we live?

Explore the May 2024 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

In The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession With Human Origins , the intellectual historian Stefanos Geroulanos, who teaches at NYU, offers a compendium of the ideas—speculative, scientific, and somewhere in between—that have arisen in response to these and other questions. Beginning with Rousseau and his idyllic state of nature, we learn the genealogy of a familiar set of tropes: the “noble savage,” the “lizard brain,” the “killer ape,” the goddess-worshipping matriarchy. Other concepts may be less familiar: the “primitive communism” of Engels and others, which allegedly existed prior to the rise of patriarchy, private property, and class struggle; Freud’s “primal horde,” commanded by a father whose murder (and ingestion) by his sons, the original band of brothers, inaugurated civilization and its discontents.

We learn about “stadial” schema, theories about the stages (usually three) through which humanity has passed: Stone/Bronze/Iron, savage/barbarian/civilized, magic/religion/science. About disputes as to where Homo sapiens emerged (China? Egypt?) and where the Indo-European peoples did (Germany? The Caucasus? Somewhere between Iran and India?). About the impact of the unearthing of the dinosaurs and other fossils, of Darwinian evolution, of geology’s discovery of deep time. About questions that continue to engross us . Who were the Neanderthals? What do the cave paintings mean? Were early humans violent or peaceful?

From the November 2021 issue: William Deresiewicz on a brilliant new history of humanity

All of this is fascinating—or would be, but for major problems. For one thing, Geroulanos is not a congenial companion. Like a professor who’s trying too hard to be cool, he sprinkles his language with clumsily modish locutions. “His prose was straight-up goth.” “Rousseau amped up the device of ‘nature’ to the max.” “Bataille vaporized history so as to teleport back to the very beginning.” Worse is the snark, which is relentless, and mostly aimed at nothing worse than the routine careerism of intellectual life. “Jumped at the chance to take credit”; “did his best to show himself to be a good schoolboy”; “had the bad taste to go over his mentors’ head”; “exudes an ambition worthy of Darwin.” Some of it is aimed at exactly the kind of work that scholars are supposed to do. Darwin used “masses of tedious evidence to establish a position others would find hard to assail.” “Other linguists insisted that thanks to their mind-numbingly dry comparative analysis of phonemes they could explain all these bigger issues.” It’s almost as if these people cared about the truth.

All of this points to deeper problems, ones that typify the drift of the contemporary academy. Geroulanos is the executive director of NYU’s Remarque Institute, a prominent center for research on Europe; an executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas ; the author or co-author of four previous books; and the co-editor or co-translator of a dozen—in short, a major figure in the history of thought. Yet instead of coming to his subject with a scholar’s open-mindedness—this, alas, is no surprise these days—he does so with self-righteousness and an agenda. His purpose is to argue that the study of humanity’s beginnings is and always must be evil. “The Euromodern search for origins began in and then contributed to a long, brutal history of conquest and empire,” he writes. “It has been drunk on hierarchy. It is rooted in illusions—often murderous ones … Its beautiful ideas have justified force against those deemed weak, different, ugly.”

This is, of course, to a great extent true. It is also not surprising. We are well aware by now that scientific concepts—or, more often, pseudo- or at best proto-scientific ones—have been used to rationalize violence and domination (so, for that matter, have nonscientific concepts). That doesn’t mean we don’t still need to talk about this fact. To pronounce Indigenous people “savage,” as Geroulanos explains, was to license one’s attempts to “civilize” them. To designate them “fossil men,” vestiges of ancient times, was to declare them fit to be displaced. Germany was the birthplace of Indo-European culture, the Nazis believed, so Germans really were the master race.

From the April 2019 issue: Adam Serwer on white nationalism’s deep American roots

But can we have all this without the attitude, the knowing, smug superiority? This so often seems to be the way now on the left—in academia, in media. We are better than the past. Or the rest of you aren’t better, but we are, my allies and I. But you aren’t better than the past; you’re just lucky enough not to live there. Nor are you better than everyone else; you’re just readier to claim you are. Exposing the sources of Western prosperity does not in itself make you virtuous.

Besides, the picture, on Geroulanos’s own evidence, is much more complicated than his politics will allow him to acknowledge. The study of human origins has not invariably been “rooted in illusions,” nor has it always “served ferocious power,” “justified force,” or “rationalized colonial domination.” Sometimes quite the opposite. Geroulanos shows this himself, yet he tends to downplay it, and in any case conveniently forgets it when making his general claims. Indeed, there is an entire through line in his book of figures who employed prehistory to criticize colonialism, capitalism, modern warfare, and modernity more broadly. Rousseau used his state of nature to attack the inequality and artificiality of 18th-century European society. Engels’s primitive communism “offered a model … for true socialist kinship.” The year after Lord of the Flies , William Golding came out with The Inheritors , a book in which he “asked his reader to identify with Neanderthals” against their aggressive, deceitful rivals, the sapiens .

Concepts developed to promote the idea of Western superiority could be turned in the other direction, and were. It is not “they” who are savages, but we: we who exterminate entire populations, slaughter one another in the trenches, bomb cities from the air. Cultural diffusionism, the idea that civilization spread from a single source, often identified as white—Mesopotamia, Northern Europe—“also contributed to an opposing set of political claims: Pan-Africanism and decolonization.”

Geroulanos presents these counterexamples as exceptions, never pausing to consider that, once you have enough of them, exceptions aren’t exceptions so much as a new rule (the study of prehistory: sometimes good), one whose tension with his old rule (the study of prehistory: evil) needs to be worked through into a broader one (prehistory: It’s complicated). So when he does mention someone who played a more positive role in Western relations with the nonwhite world, he often makes sure to undercut them, typically with little or no evidence.

Lewis Henry Morgan, a lawyer and an early ethnographer, advocated on behalf of Native Americans in the years before the Civil War. “The Seneca had adopted him in thanks for his legal and political activism,” Geroulanos tells us, “though today we would see Morgan’s role as much more problematic.” He doesn’t say why. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the great anthropologist, was relentless in his wholesale condemnation of the Western impact on Indigenous societies. Yet his arguments, Geroulanos insists, “had the peculiar quality of diminishing the effects of specific acts of colonial violence.” No reason is given. Other anthropologists are blamed for having tried to preserve what they could of disappearing cultures, if only in the form of artifacts and records of traditions. For this, Geroulanos refers to them as “drivers of colonial violence,” not bothering to explain what they were supposed to have done to stop the real drivers of colonial violence, the companies and states and armies.

This is the opposite of history, if the discipline of history is meant to help us better understand how people saw the world they lived in and the reasons they acted as they did. Instead of strutting through the past, wagging his finger and clucking his tongue, Geroulanos might have exercised a bit of generosity toward people who were trying to make sense of what they had, with the tools that they had. The theories he so gleefully belittles were responding, many of them, to developments that we’ve become accustomed to but that must have been incredibly destabilizing. What did it feel like to learn that the Earth was thousands of times older than we had ever suspected? That it contained remains of creatures more alien than anything we had ever dreamed? That among those creatures were some who looked remarkably like us, yet were somehow not us? There are flashes of this kind of sympathy, but, like the more progressive attitudes that Geroulanos keeps stumbling over, they are quickly overridden and forgotten.

Again, it’s easy to mock the humanitarian impulses of a supposedly benighted past—the belief, for example, that we are all one human family, sharing similar sorrows and joys, which displaced ideas of racial hierarchy after World War II but which Geroulanos condemns for minimizing “difference” (that postmodern holy word). But not only did this represent a real advance; it was a step toward our more enlightened understanding. Yes, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot , we know more than those who came before us, and what we know is them.

But the worst of The Invention of Prehistory is right there in the title. “Invention,” not investigation. Doesn’t it matter if this or that theory is true: about where human beings first evolved, or our historical and genetic relationship to Neanderthals, or the degree of violence in ancient hunter-gatherer societies, or how patriarchy emerged? Apparently, it doesn’t. “I do not much care if particular theories are true,” Geroulanos writes. “I ask what work they do.” It isn’t clear, in fact, if he thinks that there is such a thing as truth. This is someone who can write about “the invention of deep time” and “the ‘discovery’ of the earth’s past”—the scare quotes meaning not that the past was there all along, but that it isn’t there at all, not in any external, empirically observable way. The nascent science of geology, he writes, “played midwife to the birth … of a whole swarm of ostensibly ancient creatures” (that is, the dinosaurs). Ostensibly? So there’s no reality beneath the theories? Geroulanos ducks the question. “The story of human origins has never really been about the past. It has never really been concerned with an accurate, precise depiction of humanity’s emergence out of nature.”

I wonder what his colleagues—the geneticists and archaeologists, the linguists and the neuroscientists—would say to that. This is social constructionism, the idea that there is no truth outside our agreed interpretations, taken to its logical, inane conclusion. And it points to a crucial distinction that Geroulanos’s project denies: the difference between science and pseudo- or proto-science. We have theories about human origins now, and we had theories about them in the 19th century, but they are not the same kinds of theories. Yes, scientists can still have social biases, but contemporary scientific protocols, such as peer review, are meant to root them out. Is the system perfect? Of course not. But there is a qualitative difference between believing that humanity originated in China because (or in order to argue that) the Chinese are “backwards” and deducing that it originated in Africa because that is what genetics and paleontology suggest.

So if truth is irrelevant, what about that “work,” as Geroulanos puts it, that contemporary theories “do”? Well, that’s just the thing. For all his talk of “the new scientific ideologies,” he doesn’t turn up much, in recent decades, that’s indictable. These hypotheses include the notion that the cave paintings show evidence of shamanism; that tools and human bodies shaped each other in a “feedback loop” akin to those we know from the world of computers; that we all descend from a single genetic ancestor, popularly dubbed “Mitochondrial Eve.” All of this is pretty harmless, and certainly a distant cry from the “empire, violence” of his subtitle. Much of it, indeed, comes down on the progressive side of the ledger: goddesses and matriarchies, relatively peaceful tribes that existed before the invention of war, preagricultural egalitarianism. There are still plenty of ideologies running around that justify racism, militarism, and other evils, but they are not drawn from science, for the most part.

And insofar as they are, whose fault is that? “The archaeologists who dig up old bones and the biologists who study hominid genes,” Geroulanos writes, “are seldom the vectors of violence.” Seldom indeed. They also aren’t responsible, to name some of his targets, for Yuval Noah Harari (the “reigning prophet of prehistory’s future”), or 2001: A Space Odyssey (which popularized the idea of the “killer ape,” our supposedly brutal australopithecine ancestor, a notion that Geroulanos presents as having been designed to create an image of violent Indigenous Africans and thus to serve as an argument against decolonization). Nor should they be blamed for the far right’s appropriation of Neanderthals as the original white Europeans. If scientific findings are sensationalized by journalists, oversimplified by authors, and misused by political actors, what are scientists supposed to do? Stop doing science?

Geroulanos seems to imply that the answer is yes, at least for those who study human origins. The world of early humans, he insists, is “inconceivable,” inaccessible. Almost anything we say about it is “a narcissistic fantasy,” a myth. So he openly promotes the myths he likes, which are the ones that announce themselves as such. “I prefer [Georges] Bataille’s and [Annette] Laming-Emperaire’s myths” about the cave paintings—respectively, that the images reflect the moment at which humans became conscious of themselves as separate from nature (and thus conscious of death) and that they embody a complex symbolic system structured around gender (which Laming-Emperaire actually did not regard as a myth). Geroulanos writes admiringly about feminist imaginings that place the female at the center of human evolution. Elaine Morgan’s popularization, in The Descent of Woman , of the “aquatic ape” hypothesis —the theory that hominins developed not on the savanna but in the shallow sea, where mothers could protect their babies from feline predators—was “proudly speculative.” Susan Brownmiller’s assertion, in Against Our Will , that hominin social organization began in fear of rape , was “a primal fiction” that refused to “be judged by crude verification.” He even puts a word in for Wakanda as the “fluorescent triumph” of the Afrocentric view of human history.

This is what constructionism gets you. Geroulanos’s ultimate targets are “humanism, which has always hidden violence,” and the idea of human nature, along with the associated notion that studying the origin of the species can get us closer to understanding it. “In reality,” he writes (reality?), “humans have almost nothing in common with our paleolithic forefathers.” This is also a belief, an ideology, a myth. Human nature may be too, and so may humanism. But I’ll take them over what Geroulanos is offering.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “What’s So Bad About Asking Where Humans Came From?” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, translated and edited by Hans Aarsleff

Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, translated and edited by Hans Aarsleff , Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 274 pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 0-521-58576-7.

Reviewed by Jonathan Israel, unkown

The publication of this expertly edited and translated version of the Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746) of the Abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-80) is welcome from several points of view and perhaps especially because French and other continental philosophy of the Enlightenment is still insufficiently known and discussed in the English-speaking world. During the late 1740s and early 1750s, Condillac undeniably made a substantial philosophical contribution and has even been described as “certainly the most important French eighteenth century thinker in the field of epistemology (or ‘metaphysics’ as his contemporaries tended to call it)”. 1 At the same time, there is a long tradition of stressing Condillac’s debt to Locke, or referring to “Condillac’s brand of Lockean thought”. 2 According to Hans Aarsleff, Condillac “admired Locke as the best of philosophers because he had studied the operations of the mind without reliance on postulates about its essential nature (p. xv). According to Condillac’s original translator into English, Thomas Nugent, Condillac “followed the footsteps of the celebrated Mr. Locke, not amusing his reader with airy speculations about the nature of the human mind, but attempting to make an exact analysis of its power and capacity, to know its operations, to ascend to the origin and formation of our ideas, in order to settle the boundaries of human knowledge”. 3

Indeed, Condillac has often seemed a useful exemplum for those who consider Locke and Newton the prime patron saints of the Enlightenment and who hold that philosophically, unlike in their social and political thought, the philosophes essentially just followed the British lead. Yet it is not at all clear that scholars have been justified in drawing this inference. Indeed, when examined closely, it would seem that Condillac’s argument is not really Lockean at all, indeed that his gentle critique of Locke, in the Essay , is in reality scarcely less devastating than his onslaught on Descartes, Malebranche and the Leibnizio-Wolffian school.

Undoubtedly, Condillac, like so many of the philosophes of the High Enlightenment was deeply preoccupied with working out the implications of the great philosophical systems of the late seventeenth century. It is also true that Condillac is markedly more positive and polite when discussing Locke than when touching on Descartes, Malebranche or Wolff. But it has it be remembered that throughout continental Europe from the 1720s onwards, it was a widely familiar philosophical tactic to present one’s arguments under the auspices of Locke since Locke was the one major recent philosopher who was broadly acceptable to both the Catholic authorities –even in Spain – and Protestant theologians, being regarded as a safe pair of hands, the thinker who reconciles philosophy and theology and most satisfactorily protected miracles and the sphere of the supernatural. Claiming allegiance to Locke then was a way of claiming respectability and distancing oneself from more controversial and suspect systems.

In contrast to more obviously radical thinkers, such as La Mettrie or Diderot, Condillac—who entered the Catholic priesthood in 1741 but is said to have only celebrated mass once in his life—not infrequently invokes divine providence and the supernatural and was clearly anxious to placate conservative opinion; and, for this reason, it made eminently good sense for him to convey an air of proximity to English empiricism and remain silent about Spinoza’s epistemology. Yet when examined carefully, many of his comments on Locke are actually quite far-reaching criticisms, and as one reads on, it emerges that Condillac for all intents and purposes is demolishing Locke’s system and replacing it with something that is no longer in any meaningful sense Lockean. Thus, for Locke, sense is one thing, mind another; and while he avoids the dogmatic dualism characteristic of Cartesianism, there can be no doubt that it remains a high priority in Locke’s system that ample room be reserved for the separate existence (and presumed immortality) of the mind/soul. In effect he comes close to advocating a mind-body substance dualism without formally attempting to substantiate it. That is why Locke postulates a mind that is like a tabula rasa , something on which sense perceptions leave imprints and insists that thinking and willing are mental and not bodily functions. According to Locke, man is a body but also, at least as a working hypothesis ‘an immaterial thinking being’.

In Condillac’s eyes, Locke improved significantly on the Cartesians by seeing the origin of knowledge in the senses. But he signally failed “to examine the early progress of the operations of the mind” (p. 214). Condillac makes at least two and possibly three crucial moves which he claims Locke neglected to make, or should have made had he been rigorously consistent with his own principles. Firstly, by focusing on ‘first operations of mind’ and reducing these to the desire to experience more strongly, or ‘attend to’, certain specially striking, pleasurable, or painful, sensations, he argues that the human mind operates by connecting and recalling sensations. From this he proceeds to reduce all human thought to the ordering and elaboration of sensations: “the perception or the impression occasioned in the mind by the action of the senses is the first operation of the understanding” (p. 19). Everything else follows from that.

Secondly, Condillac lays great stress on our ability to mark, memorize, and discuss ideas by employing ‘signs’ – that is numbers, symbols or words – to represent them. Whereas for Locke, as Descartes, reasoned thought in the mind remains autonomous from expression in language, in Condillac language becomes the instrument of the higher forms of perception, enabling them to be transformed into ideas. Furthermore, what man expresses in the initial stages of language, before he matures to the level of being able to employ language as a vehicle for abstract ideas, is overwhelmingly declamation of raw emotion and appetite, after which he graduates to an intermediate stage where the aesthetic dimension, his responses to sentiment, rhythm and beauty, dominate his increasingly elaborate use of language. Hence the arts precede and are more basic than reason while language and linguistic usage, according to Condillac, pass through an evolution which mirrors the evolution of human reason itself.

Condillac, then, replaces Locke’s conception of mind as something non-physical and yet inherent in man which receives impressions from the senses and then reflects on them—that is what Cassirer called the ‘prejudice regarding innate operations of the mind’—with the notion that thought is just a higher form of sense perception, a rung on the same ladder of mental operations, which, of course, brings him much closer to Spinoza’s empiricism than Locke’s. As a consequence, as various commentators have remarked – though this is given less emphasis in Aarsleff’s introduction than it might seem to deserve – Condillac steers much further than Locke ever did towards a purely materialist conception of man and a sensationalist conception of the human mind, that is towards the oneness of body and mind and therefore to something which contemporaries would deem dangerously reminiscent of Spinozism. This uncompromising reductionism of thought to perception, as various commentators have pointed out, notably contributed to the purely materialist view of man evolving in the minds of Condillac’s more radical contemporaries such as Diderot and Helvétius.

But Condillac was no La Mettrie or Diderot, and his rhetoric about Locke is there for a good reason. In order to counterbalance the potentially radical implications of his monist epistemology, Condillac is careful to add when stipulating “that we do not have any ideas that do not come from the senses” that this applies only to the state we are in “now after the Fall” (p. 14). In this way he deftly deploys theology to guard his philosophical flanks. Such a position as he develops in this treatise would be altogether false, he insists, if one tried to apply it “to the soul in the state of innocence or after its separation from the body” (p. 14).

1. See Peter Jimack, “The French Enlightenment II: deism, morality and politics” in Stuart Brown (ed.) Routledge History of Philosophy V: British Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment (London and New York, 1996), p. 238

2. Robert G.Weyant, “Introduction” to Condillac, An Essay on the origin of Human Knowledge facsimile reproduction of the translation of Thomas Nugent (1756) (Gainesville, Florida, 1971), p. xiv

3. Ibid., “The translator’s preface”, p. vii

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Homo sapiens.

The species that you and all other living human beings on this planet belong to is Homo sapiens . During a time of dramatic climate change 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. Like other early humans that were living at this time, they gathered and hunted food, and evolved behaviors that helped them respond to the challenges of survival in unstable environments.

Anatomically, modern humans can generally be characterized by the lighter build of their skeletons compared to earlier humans. Modern humans have very large brains, which vary in size from population to population and between males and females, but the average size is approximately 1300 cubic centimeters. Housing this big  brain involved the reorganization of the skull into what is thought of as "modern" -- a thin-walled, high vaulted skull with a flat and near vertical forehead. Modern human faces also show much less (if any) of the heavy brow ridges and prognathism of other early humans. Our jaws are also less heavily developed, with smaller teeth.

Scientists sometimes use the term “anatomically modern Homo sapiens” to refer to members of our own species who lived during prehistoric times.

History of Discovery:

Unlike every other human species, Homo sapiens does not have a true type specimen. In other words, there is not a particular Homo sapiens individual that researchers recognize as being the specimen that gave Homo sapiens its name. Even though Linnaeus first described our species in 1758, it was not customary at that time to designate type specimens. It is rumored that in 1994 paleontologist Robert Bakker formally declared the skull of Edward Drinker Cope as the “lectotype”, a specimen essentially serving as the type specimen. When Cope, himself a great paleontologist, died in 1897, he willed his remains to science, and they are held by the University of Pennsylvania. But a type specimen must be one examined by the original author who names a species, so Cope’s remains do not qualify.

How They Survived:

Prehistoric Homo sapiens not only made and used stone tools, they also specialized them and made a variety of smaller, more complex, refined and specialized tools including composite stone tools, fishhooks and harpoons, bows and arrows, spear throwers and sewing needles.

For millions of years all humans, early and modern alike, had to find their own food. They spent a large part of each day gathering plants and hunting or scavenging animals. By 164,000 years ago modern humans were collecting and cooking shellfish and by 90,000 years ago modern humans had begun making special fishing tools. Then, within just the past 12,000 years, our species, Homo sapiens , made the transition to producing food and changing our surroundings. Humans found they could control the growth and breeding of certain plants and animals. This discovery led to farming and herding animals, activities that transformed Earth’s natural landscapes—first locally, then globally. As humans invested more time in producing food, they settled down. Villages became towns, and towns became cities. With more food available, the human population began to increase dramatically. Our species had been so successful that it has inadvertently created a turning point in the history of life on Earth.

Modern humans evolved a unique combination of physical and behavioral characteristics, many of which other early human species also possessed, though not to the same degree. The complex brains of modern humans enabled them to interact with each other and with their surroundings in new and different ways. As the environment became more unpredictable, bigger brains helped our ancestors survive. They made specialized tools, and use tools to make other tools, as described above; they ate a variety of animal and plant foods; they had control over fire; they lived in shelters; they built broad social networks, sometimes including people they have never even met; they exchanged resources over wide areas; and they created art, music, personal adornment, rituals, and a complex symbolic world. Modern humans have spread to every continent and vastly expanded their numbers. They have altered the world in ways that benefit them greatly. But this transformation has unintended consequences for other species as well as for ourselves, creating new survival challenges.

Evolutionary Tree Information:

Fossils and DNA confirm humans are one of more than 200 species belonging to the order of Primates. Within that larger group, humans are nested within the great ape family. Although we did not evolve from any of the apes living today, we share characteristics with chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans (the great apes), as well as other apes. We most likely evolved from Homo heidelbergensis , the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals, who are our closest extinct relatives.

We don’t know everything about our own species—but we keep learning more! Through studies of fossils, genetics, behavior, and biology of modern humans, we continue to learn more about who we are.

Below are some of the still unanswered questions about  Homo sapiens  that may be answered with future discoveries:

• Who was our direct evolutionary ancestor? Was it Homo heidelbergensis, like many paleoanthropologists think, or another species?
• How much interbreeding occured between our species and  Homo neanderthalensis?
• What does the future hold for our species in an evolutionary sense? 

References:

Recommended readings:

McBrearty, S., Brooks, A., 2000. The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern humans. Journal of Human Evolution 39, 453-563.

Henshilwood, C.S., Marean, C.W., 2003. The origin of modern human behavior: critique of the models and their test implications. Current Anthropology 44, 627-651.

Ngaloba LH 18

Skhūl V was recovered from the Skhūl Cave near Mount Carmel, Israel, along with the skeletons of nine other adults and children. Some anatomical features, like the brow ridges and occipital bun of the male Skhūl V skull are reminiscent of earlier humans; however, Skhūl V also has the high, vertical forehead and rounded skull typical of modern human skulls.

Cro-Magnon 1

Cro-Magnon 1 is a middle-aged, male skeleton of one of the first modern human fossils ever found, at Cro-Magnon, France in 1868. Scientists estimate his age at death at less than 50 years old. Except for the teeth, his skull is complete, though the bones in his face are noticeably pitted from a fungal infection.

Lapa Vermelha IV Hominid 1

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Religion – The Origin of Humanity Essay

Introduction, literature review, works cited.

The answer to origin of humanity can be traced through evolution of culture of religion. Religion has been in existence since the earlier man’s period, and records that show that some form of gods were worshipped, which can be found on caves and statutes. In addition, practices by Homo sapiens of burying their dead indicate the existence of religion. Religion also appears to be the only unique practice with human beings.

On the other hand, Darwin model of evolution indicates that through adaptation and selection, there were some forms of changes that took place in earlier organism.

By treating religion like some organism, it is possible to explore some its adaptability and selection, which made human beings more superior than other animals. In such cases, certain attributes of a religion succeeded to the next form. Within these trends of religion, it can be possible to trace exactly the period and the type of religious belief that led to humanity perception in human beings.

This paper explores the argument of other Paleolithic’s and archeologist on the origin of religion. It also explores the transformation of the first form of religion to modern type. Then in a generative discussion, it proceeds to argue that cultural changes in religion as opposed to brain development or species evolution are responsible for the change in human perception of themselves.

Mind Development

The past holds the key to understand the present and this is in archaeology hands (Mithens 10). His archeological work looks at how the human brain developed overtime by overcoming various selective pressures. According to his argument, the mind not only creates but is also capable of imagination. He disputed information from evolutionist psychologist, which argued that the mind can act like Swiss army knife.

He argued that when looking at the brain this way, it would not be possible to understand why modern brain is able to perform tasks not present in the ancestral periods. Instead, he suggests that general intelligence exists. Using a cathedral metaphor, he describes three stages of mind development. First is domination by general intelligence, which is supplemented by domain specific modules, and lastly these modules work in concert with an endless information flow to all domains.

After describing his architecture of the brain, he explored the various human evolution stages to describe the various selective pressures present. His journey begins with the exploration of the ape, common human ancestor. In this stage, he makes several deductions including that due to Chimpanzee problems in tool making, they lack technical intelligence and therefore only general intelligence can describe their behavior (Mithen 34).

He also concludes that they posses certain levels of natural history intelligence and social intelligence. The latter is due to their ability to interact. Finally, he attributes their inability to communicate to their low level of general intelligence.

The next human evolution he described is the Homo Habilis. For these, he finds their ability to form shaped tools as an indication of development of certain technical knowledge as opposed to just general intelligence, which cannot be associated with this kind or craftsmanship. As for other types of intelligence like natural history, he considers some development to have taken place. According to him, brain development reached its climax in the neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens species.

Their natural history intelligence was also more developed especially because of the increased demands by the environment. He further points to existing tools in this period as indications of improved technical intelligence (Mithen 38). To him, these humans had knowledge and abilities equivalent to the present human beings. However, he also observes that they lacked the connection between natural history intelligence and technical intelligence necessary to design multiple-purpose tools.

According to his argument, modern culture originated from increased assimilation of various specialized modules. Therefore, human beings developed objects such as artifacts to communicate social messages. In time, human also demonstrated abilities to read the mind of others as indicated by art work in the time. To him, human beings increased in flexibility on social abilities.

Darwin’s Evolution Theory

His evolution theory consists of two assumptions. The first one is that all living things share the same ancestor. Second is that of natural selection, which explains why existing living things are not similar. Therefore under natural selection, differences occur through DNA mutations.

Some mutation changes to the species characteristics can result into improved reproduction. As a result, this change enables species to survive to the next generation. Species that adapt well to a certain environment are likely to undergo little change in an environment.

Mutation though is said to be progressive even in such environment, only that now the species would remain the same. On the other hand, when the environment is changing or dynamic, the evolvement of a species would be fast. Adaptations previously enjoyed in such an occurrence would cease to be of any benefit to the species. Mutations that take place in this stage would result into changes that make the species fit into the new conditions, and the new genes would be reproduced among generations (ASSS 11).

Apart from natural selection evolution is also a factor of sexual selection. Various male species compete for sexual partners by putting on show, brilliant colors, complex calls, and other physical attributes. As for the female partner, preference is on impressive males. Consequently, these are able to get more of their DNA in the next generation. As a result, some of the traits that are attractive but have little benefit for survival are distributed in a population, like the peacock tail.

Empirical Evidence for evolution

Darwin’s theory of evolution is characterized by changes and adaptation and suggests a common ancestry for all forms of life (Ridley 44). In the contemporary society, molecular biology and chemistry evidence have continued to support his argument; that is, all living things’ physical bodies are made of same basic cells and these are made up of similar molecules.

Similarities of cells between species are more than the differences that have been observed. Anatomical structure across species are said to be more similar. For instance, frogs, rabbits, lizards and birds all have a similar bone arrangement in their forelimb, in spite of the different ways they are used.

Transitional fossils also provide other evidence for evolution of species. They record changes that take place in species across lines separating one body plan to the other and across species as well.

Evidence gathered from them points that a chronology from land mammals to whales as well as dinosaur to birds took place. It has also been verified that as expected, the most primitive organism live in deepest geological layers and complexity and variety of fossil organism increases with the layer preceding the other as one progress to the earth.

Another premise held is that related species should be close to one another both in time and space and have more similarities with existing species in their specific regions as opposed to others living elsewhere. This has been found to be true although at times, fossils of a species are not found in its habitat. Evolutionary theory explains this as a result of migration to other areas, which has been verified by scientific evidence (ASSS 12).

Questioning Darwin Theory of Evolution

The first argument put against it, challenges the first hypothesis of a common ancestry. This hypothesis suggests that all forms of life have a similar origin. It relies on argument that all species have the same DNA or genetic code, to support the similar origin.

Critics of this position argue that God used a common design plan to make the various types of living things that he created. However, they also observe that by arguing so, it might be easy to believe that similarities in various species are due to the shared ancestry or relatedness (Zacharias & Geiser 45).

One of the weaknesses of this theory is that in its argument there are no transitional species. We learn that when Darwin was challenged to defend this weakness, he said that these would be discovered in the long run. However, up to date this has not happened. Instead, just a few transitional species to date have been discovered.

However, critics argue that if his theory was true, millions of these transitional animals would be discovered in the fossils records. They therefore conclude that, although DNA argument backs the common ancestry for this theory the lack of evidence in fossil records circumvents it.

The other level of criticism challenges the mutations forces of change ability to produce new species that have certain traits making them competitive in an environment. Zacharias & Geisler argue that there is no evidence that exist today that supports ability of any mechanism to produce complex living things that exists in the world today, from single celled living things (46).

They further say that the existing evidence on the rate of change, challenges this premise. By examining other work which describes the taxonomy of evolution, they conclude that this would be impossible especially because of the long process.

The second issue taken with Darwin’s theory hypothesis of natural selection is in its inability to explain the source of irreducibly complex system. This particularly takes offense, with some of the suggestions that piecemeal changes can take place. They observe that some parts of the organs would not accommodate such piecemeal changes. In addition, no scientific evidence exists to explain that this kind of piecemeal changes could have existed (Zacharias & Geisler 47).

Biblical understanding of the World

In the nineteenth century, many Europeans believed that God inspired the Bible and that it represented the truth in all respect. From this believe they proceeded to hold that, Creations was directed by God working on his own, that he was actively engaged in it, and he created each species in its original kind and form (ASSS 7).

One of the books of the Bible called Genesis claims that human beings seized a unique place in this formation because they were the last to be created, were made in God’s own image, and were given the powers to dominate the earth.

Emergence of religion

It is not definite when religion began, although evidence points that there of the religion’s main characteristics can be traced back to Upper Paleolithic Revolution. These are shamanism, ancestor worship and belief in supernatural (Rossano 3). This period is about 40,000 years ago.

In this period the cultural changes by the Homo sapiens were evident. The brain of the Homo sapiens did not change, rather it is their capacity to transmit and develop culture. As a result of this form of change these species were able to have some form of symbolism practices in the form of statutes, burial of the dead and cave art.

The earlier man used these caves for more than just aesthetic value, to other purposes like religion. In these caves, graphics of mixture of animals and human have been discovered. They focused their artistic form of worship with their practices of biological necessities that is reproduction through genes transmission and food for survival. The period that followed was Neolithic revolution or agrarian revolution. In this period, food was available in abundance due to agriculture and domestication of animals.

As a result, populations exploded and there was an improved chance for survival. Consequently there was need for more organized religion to bring some form of social order (Hoffman, 1). Diamond argued that this form of religion was important for social cohesion among individuals who otherwise would be great enemies (277). Furthering this point he argued murder was the main cause of death for hunters’ gatherers community.

Polytheism emerged, which is the belief of multiple gods. This was practice in ancient Egypt, Greece and India. In spite of it being developed by a more developed human society, it also retained many attributes of the previous religion. For instance supernatural beliefs continued with statues and cave paintings.

Both these symbolism contained either animal or human features, or both. For instance, animal gods like those of Egyptians or the Hinduism gods of elephant and cows. These gods had specific roles that they played, like war travelers and so on. This element of worshipping god for specific roles was also common in earlier religion, like for purposes of hunting. In this period there was also pantheism form of religion which involves finding peace in oneself. Its faith is based on belief that everything in the world is divine.

Belief in polytheism not only involved personification of god, but also there was belief in the enlargement of the family. That is faith could be expanded by adding on more gods in the family. In this family, some gods whose roles were not significant were demoted to a low rank in the hierarchy.

This then brings us to the question of who among the many gods was supreme. Within the polytheistic religion supreme gods can be traced such as Zeus of the ancient Greek, who was known as the god of all gods. As for Hinduism they had their Brahma who was considered as creator of universe. These trends in religion were followed by Abraham religion prophets that led to monotheism (Hoffman 1).

This new type of religion involved the worshipping of a single God. Before Abrahamic religion, monotheism existed in the form of Zoroastrianism. This was founded in 6 th century BC by a priest known as Zarathustra. He preceded Jesus and Muhammad in converting people to monotheism from polytheism religion.

According to Zoroastrianism teachings, there is only one god and he is the one who created the earth and living and non living things in it. Some of the beliefs that Abrahamic religions adopted are from this earlier form of monotheism. These include concepts of heaven and hell, as well as unchanging cod. Judaism as founded by Abraham though is the largest form f monotheism.

This new religion began in the Middle East around 2000 BC with Judaism being the first form and prophesized by Abraham. Around 33 CE Jesus brought his message of Christianity. Finally at 622 CE, the last form of monotheism, which was Islamic religion, was started by Prophet Muhammad (Hoffman 1).

These religions believed in one god and the message about this god was spread by a human being sent by him. In the new form of religion only one God is to be worshiped and this god was the creator of everything. The new god did not in any way look like human beings.

Morality and living in groups

Although morality is a unique characteristic in humans, other animals that live in groups also exhibits some forms of pre-moral sentiments. Apes for instance practice social bonding, conflict resolution and peacemaking and other forms of morality issues. To facilitate the well being of the groups social animals, are forced to give up some of their individual needs. Within these groups there is social ranking and each animal understands it place in the hierarchy.

Animals such as the chimpanzee have been found to live in these forms of social groupings. In the same line based on the type of live they lived, early men are also presumed to have lived in similar groups. Therefore to control these groups morality is also likely to have evolved to minimize conflict, social control, and for solidarity in the group. However, unlike animals human morality is more complex in that it has stiffer regulation mechanism such as rewards and punishment as well as development of reputation.

More so, human have better judgment and reasoning than animals. Some psychologists have argued that religion developed after morality, and advanced it to include other methods of examining people’s behavior like supernatural beliefs. Through the use of the supernatural powers of ancestors for instance, humans were able to develop more powerful groups that limited selfishness among individuals. In this way religion adaptability helped to improve the chance of group to survive (Rossano 146).

In Darwin’s evolutionary theory argument, making of tools and sexual selection comes out as distinct ways of differentiating humanity from animals. However, from our argument human beings are not the only animals that are known to practice social bonding or make tools. In addition, their brain development is not a factor of expansion of the skull per-se but rather an indication of changing cultural behaviors.

Religion is one such cultural behavior that has transformed for a long time in the history of mankind. Since the early man in the Neolithic times some forms of religion have been practiced by human beings. Rituals like burying of their dead and existence of some painting and statutes have been highlighted as indication of religion in these trends. In addition, human beings are the only animals that have been observed to practice religious activities. This makes emergence of religion as one of the things that differentiate humanity from animals.

Advancing Science Serving Society (ASSS). The Evolution Dialogues . nd. Web. Retrieved

Diamond, Jarred. From Egalitarian to Kleptocracy, the Evolution of Government and Religion. In Guns Germs and Steel , Chap. 14: 277. New York, Norton. 1997. Print.

Hoffman, Howard. “The Emergence and Evolution of Belief, Religion, and the Concept of God Pt II”. serendip, serendip, 15 May 2009. Web.

Mithen, Steven J. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science . London: Thames & Hudson, 1996. Print.

Ridley, Mark. Evolution. Malden . Wiley-Blackwell. 2004. Print.

Rossano, Matt J. Supernaturalizing Social Life: Religion and the Evolution of Human Cooperation. Southeastern Louisiana University. 2007. JSTOR PDF files.

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IvyPanda. (2023, November 27). Religion - The Origin of Humanity. https://ivypanda.com/essays/religion-the-origin-of-humanity/

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Religion - The Origin of Humanity." November 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/religion-the-origin-of-humanity/.

• Hebrew Monotheism: Origins and Evolution
• Monotheism: Jews, Christians, and Muslims
• “Rational Monotheism” by Edip Yüksel
• Polytheism, Monotheism, and Humanism
• Monotheism Developed by Abram
• Monotheism in Modern Religious Studies
• Major Religions: Contribution to Religious Tolerance
• Judaism as a Monotheistic Religion
• Zoroastrianism Beliefs in Judaism and Christianity
• Human Purposes: Philosophical Perspectives
• Creationism vs. Evolutionism: The Impacts of Religion
• Tirmidhi and His Characteristics
• Create Your Own Religion
• Literature Study on Myth Related Theories
• The Parable of the Sower

• Solar Eclipse 2024

What the World Has Learned From Past Eclipses

C louds scudded over the small volcanic island of Principe, off the western coast of Africa, on the afternoon of May 29, 1919. Arthur Eddington, director of the Cambridge Observatory in the U.K., waited for the Sun to emerge. The remains of a morning thunderstorm could ruin everything.

The island was about to experience the rare and overwhelming sight of a total solar eclipse. For six minutes, the longest eclipse since 1416, the Moon would completely block the face of the Sun, pulling a curtain of darkness over a thin stripe of Earth. Eddington traveled into the eclipse path to try and prove one of the most consequential ideas of his age: Albert Einstein’s new theory of general relativity.

Eddington, a physicist, was one of the few people at the time who understood the theory, which Einstein proposed in 1915. But many other scientists were stymied by the bizarre idea that gravity is not a mutual attraction, but a warping of spacetime. Light itself would be subject to this warping, too. So an eclipse would be the best way to prove whether the theory was true, because with the Sun’s light blocked by the Moon, astronomers would be able to see whether the Sun’s gravity bent the light of distant stars behind it.

Two teams of astronomers boarded ships steaming from Liverpool, England, in March 1919 to watch the eclipse and take the measure of the stars. Eddington and his team went to Principe, and another team led by Frank Dyson of the Greenwich Observatory went to Sobral, Brazil.

Totality, the complete obscuration of the Sun, would be at 2:13 local time in Principe. Moments before the Moon slid in front of the Sun, the clouds finally began breaking up. For a moment, it was totally clear. Eddington and his group hastily captured images of a star cluster found near the Sun that day, called the Hyades, found in the constellation of Taurus. The astronomers were using the best astronomical technology of the time, photographic plates, which are large exposures taken on glass instead of film. Stars appeared on seven of the plates, and solar “prominences,” filaments of gas streaming from the Sun, appeared on others.

Eddington wanted to stay in Principe to measure the Hyades when there was no eclipse, but a ship workers’ strike made him leave early. Later, Eddington and Dyson both compared the glass plates taken during the eclipse to other glass plates captured of the Hyades in a different part of the sky, when there was no eclipse. On the images from Eddington’s and Dyson’s expeditions, the stars were not aligned. The 40-year-old Einstein was right.

“Lights All Askew In the Heavens,” the New York Times proclaimed when the scientific papers were published. The eclipse was the key to the discovery—as so many solar eclipses before and since have illuminated new findings about our universe.

To understand why Eddington and Dyson traveled such distances to watch the eclipse, we need to talk about gravity.

Since at least the days of Isaac Newton, who wrote in 1687, scientists thought gravity was a simple force of mutual attraction. Newton proposed that every object in the universe attracts every other object in the universe, and that the strength of this attraction is related to the size of the objects and the distances among them. This is mostly true, actually, but it’s a little more nuanced than that.

On much larger scales, like among black holes or galaxy clusters, Newtonian gravity falls short. It also can’t accurately account for the movement of large objects that are close together, such as how the orbit of Mercury is affected by its proximity the Sun.

Albert Einstein’s most consequential breakthrough solved these problems. General relativity holds that gravity is not really an invisible force of mutual attraction, but a distortion. Rather than some kind of mutual tug-of-war, large objects like the Sun and other stars respond relative to each other because the space they are in has been altered. Their mass is so great that they bend the fabric of space and time around themselves.

Read More: 10 Surprising Facts About the 2024 Solar Eclipse

This was a weird concept, and many scientists thought Einstein’s ideas and equations were ridiculous. But others thought it sounded reasonable. Einstein and others knew that if the theory was correct, and the fabric of reality is bending around large objects, then light itself would have to follow that bend. The light of a star in the great distance, for instance, would seem to curve around a large object in front of it, nearer to us—like our Sun. But normally, it’s impossible to study stars behind the Sun to measure this effect. Enter an eclipse.

Einstein’s theory gives an equation for how much the Sun’s gravity would displace the images of background stars. Newton’s theory predicts only half that amount of displacement.

Eddington and Dyson measured the Hyades cluster because it contains many stars; the more stars to distort, the better the comparison. Both teams of scientists encountered strange political and natural obstacles in making the discovery, which are chronicled beautifully in the book No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse That Confirmed Einstein's Theory of Relativity , by the physicist Daniel Kennefick. But the confirmation of Einstein’s ideas was worth it. Eddington said as much in a letter to his mother: “The one good plate that I measured gave a result agreeing with Einstein,” he wrote , “and I think I have got a little confirmation from a second plate.”

The Eddington-Dyson experiments were hardly the first time scientists used eclipses to make profound new discoveries. The idea dates to the beginnings of human civilization.

Careful records of lunar and solar eclipses are one of the greatest legacies of ancient Babylon. Astronomers—or astrologers, really, but the goal was the same—were able to predict both lunar and solar eclipses with impressive accuracy. They worked out what we now call the Saros Cycle, a repeating period of 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours in which eclipses appear to repeat. One Saros cycle is equal to 223 synodic months, which is the time it takes the Moon to return to the same phase as seen from Earth. They also figured out, though may not have understood it completely, the geometry that enables eclipses to happen.

The path we trace around the Sun is called the ecliptic. Our planet’s axis is tilted with respect to the ecliptic plane, which is why we have seasons, and why the other celestial bodies seem to cross the same general path in our sky.

As the Moon goes around Earth, it, too, crosses the plane of the ecliptic twice in a year. The ascending node is where the Moon moves into the northern ecliptic. The descending node is where the Moon enters the southern ecliptic. When the Moon crosses a node, a total solar eclipse can happen. Ancient astronomers were aware of these points in the sky, and by the apex of Babylonian civilization, they were very good at predicting when eclipses would occur.

Two and a half millennia later, in 2016, astronomers used these same ancient records to measure the change in the rate at which Earth’s rotation is slowing—which is to say, the amount by which are days are lengthening, over thousands of years.

By the middle of the 19 th century, scientific discoveries came at a frenetic pace, and eclipses powered many of them. In October 1868, two astronomers, Pierre Jules César Janssen and Joseph Norman Lockyer, separately measured the colors of sunlight during a total eclipse. Each found evidence of an unknown element, indicating a new discovery: Helium, named for the Greek god of the Sun. In another eclipse in 1869, astronomers found convincing evidence of another new element, which they nicknamed coronium—before learning a few decades later that it was not a new element, but highly ionized iron, indicating that the Sun’s atmosphere is exceptionally, bizarrely hot. This oddity led to the prediction, in the 1950s, of a continual outflow that we now call the solar wind.

And during solar eclipses between 1878 and 1908, astronomers searched in vain for a proposed extra planet within the orbit of Mercury. Provisionally named Vulcan, this planet was thought to exist because Newtonian gravity could not fully describe Mercury’s strange orbit. The matter of the innermost planet’s path was settled, finally, in 1915, when Einstein used general relativity equations to explain it.

Many eclipse expeditions were intended to learn something new, or to prove an idea right—or wrong. But many of these discoveries have major practical effects on us. Understanding the Sun, and why its atmosphere gets so hot, can help us predict solar outbursts that could disrupt the power grid and communications satellites. Understanding gravity, at all scales, allows us to know and to navigate the cosmos.

GPS satellites, for instance, provide accurate measurements down to inches on Earth. Relativity equations account for the effects of the Earth’s gravity and the distances between the satellites and their receivers on the ground. Special relativity holds that the clocks on satellites, which experience weaker gravity, seem to run slower than clocks under the stronger force of gravity on Earth. From the point of view of the satellite, Earth clocks seem to run faster. We can use different satellites in different positions, and different ground stations, to accurately triangulate our positions on Earth down to inches. Without those calculations, GPS satellites would be far less precise.

This year, scientists fanned out across North America and in the skies above it will continue the legacy of eclipse science. Scientists from NASA and several universities and other research institutions will study Earth’s atmosphere; the Sun’s atmosphere; the Sun’s magnetic fields; and the Sun’s atmospheric outbursts, called coronal mass ejections.

When you look up at the Sun and Moon on the eclipse , the Moon’s day — or just observe its shadow darkening the ground beneath the clouds, which seems more likely — think about all the discoveries still yet waiting to happen, just behind the shadow of the Moon.

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The Renaissance Unveiled: a Symphony of Human Brilliance

In this exploration of the Renaissance, the term “Renaissance Unveiled: A Symphony of Human Brilliance” paints a vivid picture of this transformative era, extending beyond the conventional historical narrative. Evoking a living tableau rather than a mere revival, the essay delves into the dynamic forces that reshaped human expression, knowledge, and creativity. The term “renaissance” is dissected beyond its temporal confines, presenting it as an organic awakening—a phoenix rising from medieval constraints. Humanism takes center stage, propelling a nuanced exploration of human potential celebrated by artists, writers, and thinkers. The Renaissance, far from confined to the canvas, permeates literature and science, with the advent of the printing press democratizing knowledge. Beyond intellectual circles, this period’s impact on societal norms and everyday life is explored, showcasing the spirit of exploration that laid the groundwork for the Age of Discovery. Ultimately, the essay unveils the Renaissance as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon, a celebration of human spirit, and an exploration of profound depths that continue to resonate through the epochs of human history. More free essay examples are accessible at PapersOwl about Human.

How it works

In the grand tapestry of human history, the term “Renaissance” orchestrates a vibrant movement, resonating with the echoes of artistic brilliance, intellectual fervor, and societal transformation. Stepping beyond its traditional time frame, which loosely spans the 14th to the 17th century in Europe, the Renaissance emerges as a living tableau—an organic awakening that reshaped the very fabric of human expression, knowledge, and creativity.

Derived from the French word for “rebirth” or “reawakening,” the term encapsulates the core essence of the era.

It was more than a mere revival; the Renaissance was a dynamic force, urging society forward into uncharted territories of innovation and enlightenment, akin to a phoenix rising from the ashes of medieval constraints.

At its heart, the Renaissance champions humanism, a philosophical current that places human beings at the forefront. Departing from the medieval worldview, where human existence often played second fiddle to the divine, this era embraced a nuanced exploration of human potential. Artists, writers, and thinkers reveled in the celebration of individualism, recognizing the inherent capacities for reason, creativity, and self-expression.

Art became the harbinger of this new worldview during the Renaissance. Visionaries such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael transcended the boundaries of mere craftsmanship, creating masterpieces that were nothing short of an ode to human brilliance. The visual arts, characterized by an unprecedented realism and an intricate understanding of human anatomy, mirrored the broader societal shift towards a profound comprehension of the human experience.

Yet, the Renaissance wasn’t confined to the canvas; it permeated the realms of literature and science. The advent of the printing press catalyzed the democratization of knowledge, allowing a wider audience to engage with literature and ideas. Works like Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” and William Shakespeare’s plays embodied the Renaissance spirit, delving into the intricacies of the human experience. Concurrently, scientific inquiry flourished, with luminaries such as Copernicus and Galileo challenging existing notions about the cosmos, ushering in a more empirical understanding of the world.

The impact of the Renaissance stretched far beyond intellectual circles, shaping societal norms and everyday life. The renewed emphasis on human potential spurred a spirit of exploration and curiosity that transcended disciplinary boundaries. This period laid the groundwork for the Age of Discovery, as navigators and explorers ventured into uncharted territories, expanding the boundaries of the known world. The Renaissance wasn’t a distant echo in ivory towers; it seeped into the very fabric of society, influencing how people lived, worked, and perceived the world around them.

In essence, the Renaissance unfolds as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon defying a narrow definition. It wasn’t just a historical interlude; it was a vivification—a departure from the constraints of the medieval past and a rediscovery of the boundless possibilities inherent in human creativity and intellect. Beyond being a chapter in history, the Renaissance stands as a testament to the indomitable force of human agency and the enduring pursuit of knowledge, expression, and self-realization. It remains a celebration of the quintessential human spirit—an exploration of the profound depths of human ingenuity that reverberates across the epochs of human history.

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When the Moon Obscures the Sun, How Does Life on Earth Respond?

From fish to flamingos, here’s what scientists know — and what they hope to find out — about how plants and animals react to a total solar eclipse

Naomi Greenberg

If the sky briefly went dark during the middle of the day in ancient Greece, people took this to mean that the gods must be angry. Around the world and throughout history, an unexpected dark sky brought fear, amazement, and wonder. People have come up with countless variations to explain this puzzling phenomenon: the sun must be furious, or the sun is sick, or the sun has dropped its torch.

Now, humans know that a sudden darkening of the sky can be due to a meteorological event called a solar eclipse, which occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun.

On April 8, 2024, large swaths of North America will experience a total solar eclipse, during which the sun’s light will be completely blocked from certain perspectives on Earth for about three to four minutes. During this temporary outage of solar light, people will gather to watch the sky, don “eclipse glasses” to protect their eyes and uncover long-abandoned digital cameras.

But humans won’t be the only species in the eclipse’s path to respond in unusual ways. Here’s what we know so far about how animals will react to a total eclipse, and what questions scientists are hoping to answer during the April 8 event.

Humans have a sleep cycle — or circadian rhythm — that is largely internal. Anyone who has experienced jet lag is familiar with the frustrating feeling of one’s body being out of calibration with the local time.

But for some organisms, waking and sleeping cycles are almost entirely dependent on the sun. This means that the darkness caused by an eclipse can trigger the responses that are typical of night.

Fish, for instance, respond to decreased light intensity during a solar eclipse the way they would respond to dusk. During a 1998 total eclipse in the Galapagos, diurnal fish rapidly adopted nighttime behavior, while nocturnal fish gradually left the cover of their daytime habitats. Similarly, foraging bees ceased flying during the totality of the 2017 eclipse, instead returning to their hives. Spiders that typically took down their webs at dusk began dismantling them during a total eclipse in 1991.

Large mammals also took a bedtime cue from the eclipse. A pair of African elephants approached the entrance of their barn during totality at the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, in 2017, as if they were headed to sleep. This zoo also had a group of gorillas enter their enclosures during the dark spell as they did every evening.

Unlike the creatures that simply start their nighttime routine early, some species have a frenzied response to the eclipse. Flamingos, for instance, exhibited restlessness and anxiety during the 2017 totality. The birds flocked together and vocalized loudly, and in some cases paced around their enclosure and swarmed together at the onset of the eclipse at both the Riverbanks Zoo and the Nashville Zoo.

Giraffes also moved more during the unusual darkness. Some giraffes even began to gallop for several minutes during totality and pace around their enclosure following the event. Meanwhile, a pair of tortoises at the Riverbanks Zoo began mating just before the eclipse, while other tortoises became more active and moved rapidly. After the eclipse, the tortoises gazed up at the sky.

Researchers at zoos across the path of this month’s total solar eclipse are planning to study animal behavior during totality. This will include zoos everywhere from Fort Worth, Texas, to Indianapolis, Indiana.

Though there may be less vocalizing and movement amongst plants than members of the animal kingdom, the effect of a solar eclipse on these organisms is still profound. With lower temperatures, lower vapor pressures and less light available during a solar eclipse, plants have a limited ability to photosynthesize during the eclipse.

One study from the 2017 eclipse estimated a 14% reduction in photosynthesis over the whole day in a sagebrush area in the Western U.S. According to the study’s authors, this can be especially harmful if the plant is already experiencing drought conditions. Another study conducted during a total solar eclipse in Chile found that shade-intolerant trees were more susceptible to a solar eclipse than shade-tolerant trees were.

For many organisms, the sun is not only a cue for when to go to sleep, but also when to migrate. Solar eclipses have been shown to impact the mass movement of organisms from one location to another.

The world’s largest migration event is the daily upwelling of zooplankton in the world’s oceans  from the depths to shallower water in response to signals from the sun. This daily movement, called Diel Vertical Migration or DVM, occurs at sunrise and sunset. During the 2017 eclipse, scientists found that this mass migration event occurred during the eclipse as it would at dusk off the coast of Oregon. The zooplankton migrated up as the sky darkened then returned to the deep ocean as the sun reappeared from behind the moon.

Bird migration may also be impacted by decreased light levels during the solar eclipse. Some birds are diurnal migrants that travel mainly during the day, while others are nocturnal migrants that prefer to migrate at night. In a 2017 paper on migration during a solar eclipse, researchers found that the total eclipse provided a cue for diurnal migrants to cease flying but did not cause nocturnal migrants to start flying.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the NASA Eclipse Soundscapes Project both plan to further investigate migratory behavior during the eclipse. Because this month’s eclipse takes place during the spring migration season, it will be an opportune time to research how migratory birds respond to a total solar eclipse.

There is also a category of organisms that do not let solar eclipses throw off their typical routines. Household pets like cats and dogs tend to be unfazed by an eclipse. Domesticated farm animals like dairy cattle also show little responce to a solar eclipse. And even our closest relatives, chimpanzees, react only by looking up at the sky.

Although humans understand what an eclipse is and how best to react (don’t look at the sun without safety glasses!), we still know very little about how plants and animals on earth will react. With several intriguing scientific studies slated for April 8, we may get a better understanding than ever of how a solar eclipse affects sleep, anxiety, migration and other behaviors throughout the animal kingdom. 

Related Stories A Brief History of Eclipse Chasers Five Fascinating Science Projects Using the Total Solar Eclipse to Illuminate New Discoveries Turning Off Your Lights Could Save Millions of Birds Each Year from Deadly Building Collisions Peer Through the Glare to Glimpse the Night Sky in New Smithsonian Exhibition What Does an Eclipse Sound Like?

Naomi Greenberg | READ MORE

Naomi Greenberg is a Science Writing Intern with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. She translates natural history research for general consumption in her writing for Smithsonian Voices as well as for the Smithsonian Ocean Portal. She is a senior at Georgetown University, where she founded and led the science section of the campus newspaper, The Hoya, in addition to studying biology and journalism. You can find more of her work  here .

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Guest Essay

The Two-State Solution Is an Unjust, Impossible Fantasy

By Tareq Baconi

Mr. Baconi is the author of “Hamas Contained” and the president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.

After 176 days, Israel’s assault on Gaza has not stopped and has expanded into what Human Rights Watch has declared to be a policy of starvation as a weapon of war. More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, and the international community has reverted to a deeply familiar call for a two-state solution, under which Palestinians and Israelis can coexist in peace and security. President Biden even declared “the only real solution is a two-state solution” in his State of the Union address last month.

But the call rings hollow. The language that surrounds a two-state solution has lost all meaning. Over the years, I’ve encountered many Western diplomats who privately roll their eyes at the prospect of two states — given Israel’s staunch opposition to it, the lack of interest in the West in exerting enough pressure on Israel to change its behavior and Palestinian political ossification — even as their politicians repeat the phrase ad nauseam. Yet in the shadow of what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be genocide, everyone has returned to the chorus line, stressing that the gravity of the situation means that this time will be different.

It will not be. Repeating the two-state solution mantra has allowed policymakers to avoid confronting the reality that partition is unattainable in the case of Israel and Palestine, and illegitimate as an arrangement originally imposed on Palestinians without their consent in 1947. And fundamentally, the concept of the two-state solution has evolved to become a central pillar of sustaining Palestinian subjugation and Israeli impunity. The idea of two states as a pathway to justice has in and of itself normalized the daily violence meted out against Palestinians by Israel’s regime of apartheid.

The circumstances facing Palestinians before Oct. 7, 2023, exemplified how deadly the status quo had become. In 2022, Israeli violence killed at least 34 Palestinian children in the West Bank, the most in 15 years, and by mid-2023, that rate was on track to exceed those levels. Yet the Biden administration still saw fit to further legitimize Israel, expanding its diplomatic relations in the region and rewarding it with a U.S. visa waiver . Palestine was largely absent from the international agenda until Israeli Jews were killed on Oct. 7. The fact that Israel and its allies were ill prepared for any kind of challenge to Israeli rule underscores just how invisible the Palestinians were and how sustainable their oppression was deemed to be on the global stage.

This moment of historical rupture offers blood-soaked proof that policies to date have failed, yet countries seek to resurrect them all the same. Instead of taking measures showing a genuine commitment to peace — like meaningfully pressuring Israel to end settlement building and lift the blockade on Gaza or discontinuing America’s expansive military support — Washington is doing the opposite. The United States has aggressively wielded its use of its veto at the United Nations Security Council, and even when it abstains, as it did in the recent vote leading to the first resolution for a cease-fire since Oct. 7, it claims such resolutions are nonbinding. The United States is funding Israel’s military while defunding the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, a critical institution for Palestinians, bolstering the deeply unpopular and illegitimate Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians now consider to be a subcontractor to the occupation, and subverting international law by limiting avenues of accountability for Israel. In effect, these actions safeguard Israeli impunity.

The vacuity of the two-state solution mantra is most obvious in how often policymakers speak of recognizing a Palestinian state without discussing an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. Quite the contrary: With the United States reportedly exploring initiatives to recognize Palestinian statehood, it is simultaneously defending Israel’s prolonged occupation at the International Court of Justice, arguing that Israel faces “very real security needs” that justify its continued control over Palestinian territories.

What might explain this seeming contradiction?

The concept of partition has long been used as a blunt policy tool by colonial powers to manage the affairs of their colonies, and Palestine was no exception. The Zionist movement emerged within the era of European colonialism and was given its most important imprimatur by the British Empire. The Balfour Declaration, issued by the British in 1917, called for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine without adequately accounting for the Palestinians who constituted a vast majority in the region and whom Balfour referred to simply as “non-Jewish communities.” This declaration was then imposed on the Palestinians, who by 1922 had become Britain’s colonized subjects and were not asked to give consent to the partitioning of their homeland. Three decades later, the United Nations institutionalized partition with the passage of the 1947 plan, which called for partitioning Palestine into two independent states, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish.

All of Palestine’s neighboring countries in the Middle East and North Africa that had achieved independence from their colonial rulers and joined the United Nations voted against the 1947 plan. The Palestinians were not formally considered in a vote that many saw as illegitimate; it partitioned their homeland to accommodate Zionist immigration, which they had resisted from the onset. The Palestine Liberation Organization, established more than a decade later, formalized this opposition, insisting that Palestine as defined within the boundaries that existed during the British Mandate was “an indivisible territorial unit”; it forcefully refused two states and by the late 1970s was fighting for a secular, democratic state. By the 1980s, however, the P.L.O. chairman, Yasir Arafat, along with most of the organization’s leadership, had come to accept that partition was the pragmatic choice, and many Palestinians who had by then been ground down by the machinery of the occupation accepted it as a way of achieving separateness from Israeli settlers and the creation of their own state.

It took more than three decades for Palestinians to understand that separateness would never come, that the goal of this policy was to maintain the illusion of partition in some distant future indefinitely. In that twilight zone, Israel’s expansionist violence increased and became more forthright, as Israeli leaders became more brazen in their commitment to full control from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel also relied on discredited Palestinian leaders to sustain their control — primarily those who lead the Palestinian Authority and who collaborate with Israel’s machinations and make do with nonsovereign, noncontiguous Bantustans that never challenge Israel’s overarching domination. This kind of demographic engineering, which entails geographic isolation of unwanted populations behind walls, is central to apartheid regimes. Repeating the aspiration for two states and arguing that partition remains viable presents Israel as a Jewish and democratic state — separate from its occupation — giving it a veneer of palatability and obfuscating the reality that it rules over more non-Jews than Jews .

Seen in this light, the failed attempts at a two-state solution are not a failure for Israel at all but a resounding success, as they have fortified Israel’s grip over this territory while peace negotiations ebbed and flowed but never concluded. In recent years, international and Israeli human rights organizations have acknowledged what many Palestinians have long argued: that Israel is a perpetrator of apartheid. B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, concluded that Israel is a singular regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea.

Now, with international attention once again focused on the region, many Palestinians understand the dangers of discussing partition, even as a pragmatic option. Many refuse to resuscitate this hollowed-out policy-speak. In a message recently published anonymously, a group of Palestinians on the ground and in the diaspora state wrote: “The partition of Palestine is nothing but a legitimation of Zionism, a betrayal of our people and the final completion of the nakba,” or catastrophe, which refers to the expulsion and flight of about 750,000 Palestinians with Israel’s founding. “Our liberation can only be achieved through a unity of struggle, built upon a unity of people and a unity of land.”

For them, the Palestinian state that their inept leaders continue to peddle, even if achievable, would fail to undo the fact that Palestinian refugees are unable to return to their homes, now in Israel, and that Palestinian citizens of Israel would continue to reside as second-class citizens within a so-called Jewish state.

Global powers might choose to ignore this sentiment as unrealistic, if they even take note of it. They might also choose to ignore Israeli rejection of a two-state solution, as Israeli leaders drop any pretenses and explicitly oppose any pathway to Palestinian statehood. As recently as January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River.” He added, “That collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can we do?”

And yet the two-state solution continues to be at the forefront for policymakers who have returned to contorting the reality of an expansionist regime into a policy prescription they can hold on to. They cycle through provisions that the Palestinian state must be demilitarized, that Israel will maintain security oversight, that not every state in the world has the same level of sovereignty. It is like watching a century of failure, culminating in the train wreck of the peace process, replay itself in the span of the past five months.

This will not be the first time that Palestinian demands are not taken into account as far as their own future is concerned. But all policymakers should heed the lesson of Oct. 7: There will be neither peace nor justice while Palestinians are subjugated behind walls and under Israeli domination.

A single state from the river to the sea might appear unrealistic or fantastical or a recipe for further bloodshed. But it is the only state that exists in the real world — not in the fantasies of policymakers. The question, then, is: How can it be transformed into one that is just?

Source photographs by Jose A. Bernat Bacete, Daily Herald Archive and Lior Mizrahi, via Getty Images.

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