Go here to subscribe to The Universe on your favorite podcast app:
It would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called “cradle of humankind,” and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.
*****
PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to
*****
Eons is a production of Complexly for PBS Digital Studios.
Super special thanks to the following Patreon patrons for helping make Eons possible:
Kevin Lacson, Marco Narajos, Collin Dutrow, Pope John XII, Steven Kern, Aaditya Mehta, AllPizzasArePersonal, John H. Austin, Jr., Alex Hackman, Amanda Ward, Stephen Patterson, Karen Farrell, Trevor Long, Jason Rostoker, Jonathan Rust, Mary Tevington, Bart & Elke van Iersel – De Jong, Irene Wood, Derek Helling, Mark Talbott-Williams, Nomi Alchin, Duane Westhoff, Hillary Ryde-Collins, Yu Mei, Albert Folsom, Heathe Kyle Yeakley, Dan Caffee, Nick Ryhajlo, Jeff Graham
If you’d like to support the channel, head over to and pledge for some cool rewards!
Want to follow Eons elsewhere on the internet?
Facebook –
Twitter –
Instagram –
#Eons #evolution
References:
Great content!!!
I love this video! I very much enjoyed this one.
It is only recently that scholarship has become internationally accepting of the idea that hominidae left Africa MULTIPLE times. What is strange to me is that I, as only a moderately educated person, knew this to be true (knew meaning confidently believed that it must be true). The reason I bieved this long before it became "commin kniwledge" is because of Neanderthals. They are so divergent from us yet lived at the same time when homo sapiens moved from Africa to where the Neanderthals wrte snd had been for tens of thousands of years. I projected that their ancestors MUST have left Africa long before we did because of the time needed to become so different (which MUST have been BEFORE we evolved from the common ancestor that we shared. I came to this belief over 20 years ago. It surprizrd me that it took the scientific community so long to start presenting this model publically given how obvious this factbwas to me.
Is that a Little Rooms necklace I see? Two of my favs in one!
Its well known human civilization started in africa
This new hypothesis is so different (but fascinating) from what I've learned for the last 40 years. I like it! Our story keeps getting better.
So multi-regional but mostly in Africa. Prior to Homo erectus I wonder if hybridization lead to their rapid rise from many species or subspecies at the time. Such as possibly the bigger bodies of robust australopithicines and bigger brains of Homo habilis and the mysterious Homo Rudolfensis. The scarcity of H rudolfensis might come from being a very transitional phase. The weirdness of naledi suggests either parallel evolution to a late homo body plan or that it predated brain size increases. The latter seems contraindicated by the fact the early erectus fossils had a similar brain to body ratio to Homo habilis suggesting they were mainly a supersized version due to change in lifestyle.
Darwin hypothesized the answer with just scientific intuition.
Great episode as normal!
@ 10:15 where can i get this chart on a T-shirt.
Great presentation as usual. Eloquent and informative.
This is pretty cool to discover.
Apply paleoclimatology 300K-10K BCE and anthropology with a little cross comparative mythology and you find Atlantis.
10:13 – I suspect this will be the story of our future, and even any given individual's story of future identity/identities as well, branching, merging, re-merging, and so on…
Neanderthal Man was in conflict with Homo Sapiens for thousands of years and a climatic cataclysm destroyed them as the surviving Homo Sapiens hid in caves and cavern systems only to emerge after their destruction, some Youtube channel goes into this in-depth, I forget🤔
Really would like some science without the politics please.
Still we can say a mix of ancient east African and south African groups of humans gave rise to H. s. sapiens.
so to all racists outta there, we humans are a mixture of many human races, and as always the mixture seems to be more durable than the ingredients in solo… wonderful to think of (for me)
Excellent video
The Human Race from time immemorial is actually very social and friendly.
When two groups come together we trade, talk, curiosity exchange and make communication . We also exchange sexual encounters and partners.
(Sometimes we fight and retreat)
Genocide and holocaust are rare events.
What’s interesting is this is also applicable to LUCA (last universal common ancestor). It’s reasonable to assume that all life on earth began from LUCA however – if life really was that simple at one point in time it is reasonable to theorize that there was never a universal common ancestor. Suppose proteins formed separately but were similar enough that we would never be able to tell the difference and the two may have been able to integrate at some point in time.
Rereading this I realize how hard the concept in my head is to explain.
The only "problem" with this video is that it's only 12min long. I wish I'd studied this subject at university and not computer science 😒.
I recently watched a Podcast where this bottle neck problem was explained how 2 times there were bottle neck and the relating theory to it. It was a podcast by Ranveer Allahabadia and Nilesh Oak Mahabharata.
the comment about including the location populations is so idiotic, unmerited, an inappropriate
is it even possible for a single person to understand the entire system from beginning to end? or is this the point? this video is the point of humanity, a collective of hundreds of thousands of years in information in a singular, easy to watch video? that's mindblowing i think
Yes, there is a cradle of humanity. It's called Africa.
I hate this type of representation. colonial, and the locals pushed out? Do you mean the locals without a written language were supposed to contribute to the research?! Laughable
Loved this video. I have been visiting Africa for several years now and the origin story is always up for discussion. Many feel the Cradle of Humankind in down in South Africa while others believe it is in Kenya.
Sounds like because home erectus walked to Asia, Europe, that it's possible some variations survived to breed with our more social ancestors
This channel's obstinate commitment to Linnean taxonomy makes it really difficult to intuit any true sense of the cladistics involved. Concepts like crown groups and genera just confuse people now