In recent years guest editor Rob Oele has conducted extensive research into human origins. Specially for Scientias.nl he summarizes the most important insights he gained in this way once more.

In 2014 I started a personal quest to find out about our human origins. Through eight previous articles on Scientias.nl I regularly updated the readers about this. In this article I summarize the main results of my search, which briefly boil down to the following. Many human(like)s, including Homo sapiens, exchanged things, knowledge and also genes with each other for hundreds of thousands of years with some regularity. Gradually they spun a worldwide web that initially stretched across Africa, Asia and Europe; some tens of thousands of years ago they also added North and South America. Also based on my previous Scientias.nlarticles I explain below how I arrived at this finding.

Cultural and cognitive links

For my first article ‘Our origins: we still have no idea what we don’t know yet’ I interviewed Wil Roebroeks, professor Human origins at Leiden University. Immediately the topic of global (cultural) links came up. He said that it had just been established that Indonesian petroglyphs turned out to be the same age as the oldest European petroglyphs. It was especially striking that they are also very similar, which implies that a cultural network already existed 40,000 years ago over a distance of no less than 12,000 kilometers. This theme came up again last autumn when I talked to one of his colleagues, Katharine MacDonald, about her 2021 publication spoke. With regard to this theme, she took a very big step further back in time with regard to this theme. She states that early humans even had the culture from about 400,000 to 350,000 years ago to exchange knowledge and stuff. It is especially remarkable that this exchange also took place with people (like) and outside their own group.

Our distant ancestors also spun a hybrid web together

In my second article “How genetics is changing the search for our origins” I discussed the enormous impact this type of research has had in the field of paleoanthropology. As a result, in 2010 it was established that there is Neanderthal DNA in our own Homo sapiensDNA is what came as a big surprise to many. But now that we are more than a decade later, this event turned out to be no exception. More and more sophisticated genetic research shows that many more human(es) during the past hundreds of thousands of years in our Homo sapiens family tree entered. So we spun in ‘co-production’ with other human(like) and also a web from which potentially (hybrid) offspring could arise. In jargon, such a pool of (human) species is called a ‘metapopulation’.

These insights are quite new and that is because people have quickly started to think differently about the nature of human species. That point was discussed in my sixth article ‘Our own origin continues to surprise us’, for which I interviewed Wil Roebroeks again after five years to look back on that period. I asked him what he thought was the most important change in thinking in his field and he replied, “the blurring of the notion of species.” Homo sapiens and Neanderthals therefore certainly belong to the same metapopulation, but other differences between the two were small in the period that they together populated the globe. I described this mainly in my third article ‘The Neanderthal and modern man: spot the differences’. Recently, it has also been proven that Neanderthals produced (caves) art. They were just people!

From linear descent to interactions

For a long time it was thought that modern humans descended in a direct, and thus pure line, from a special group of people that arose quite suddenly somewhere in (East) Africa about a quarter of a million years ago. These were in fact so dominant that they wiped out all other human(es) during their spread across the globe, so that exchanges had little or no chance. In particular, in my fourth article ‘How 2015 shook the view of our origins’ I argued that this simple version is no longer correct. There was genetic mixing going on with other human(es) as I mentioned earlier. And it didn’t stop at those kinds of interactions: especially in recent years it has been shown that things and knowledge were also shared with each other with some regularity. The Middle East in particular seems to have been an area of ​​interaction in that regard. Homo sapiens was already present there more than 200,000 years ago and he lived there during several epochs together with Neanderthals. A recent find (2021) in Israel also shows that at least one other human being lived there at the time. ‘Nesher Ramla’, (that’s what he was called) also had Neanderthal features. At the same time, Nesher Ramla used similar tools as Gay Sapiens†

A ‘modern’ human being walked around very early in China

Asia is increasingly regarded as a co-source area of ​​our deep roots. A skull from China (Harbin) may serve as a current example. It had been found before, but it was not properly examined until 2021 and furthermore dated at least 140,000 years old, but it was probably much older. The dragon man (that is what he was given) resembled a modern man because his brain was at least as large as that of a modern man, and his face also resembled ours. But the rest of its elongated, flatter skull points to other genetic influences. Would the ‘African’ Homo sapiens have mingled there so early with a locally created human(like)? Or did the dragon man (you see it above this article) develop without interference from the Asian metapopulation of human(es)? Who knows may say.

North and South America were finally linked to the worldwide human web. In my fifth article ‘The Rediscovery of America’ I mentioned that this process was more complex than expected. First there was the “simple” explanation that human pioneers walked into America from Asia through the frozen Bering Strait about 14,000 years ago. Now there is mounting evidence that humans existed on the American continent tens of thousands of years earlier. Moreover, it is now suggested that there were (also) supply lines by sea, perhaps even from Europe. Here, too, the puzzle is still a long way off, quite the contrary.

Human development continues

In my quest over the past eight years, the precise nature of our deep roots has only become more complex and uncertain. On the other hand, I think I have discovered a certain dynamic. It actually only became visible in the same period, now that it is becoming clear that our distant ancestors regularly shared knowledge, stuff and also genes. In conclusion, this is my personal final conclusion: wandering across the continents spun humans (like) including Homo sapiens, a worldwide web for hundreds of thousands of years. What is special is that ‘modern man’ is now the only remaining end product of that co-production. But does that development not actually continue within that one ‘end product’? Homo sapiens, for example, recently added a digital worldwide web!’