Human types. Settlement of ancient people.

Among scholars there is no consensus on the issue of continuity between Nomo Habilis and Noto egectus (upright man). The oldest find of the remains of Homo egectus near Lake Turkan in Kenya dates back to 17 million years ago. For some time, Homo erectus coexisted with Homo habilis. In appearance, Nomo egestus was even more different from a monkey˸ the growth of ᴇᴦο was close to the growth of a modern person, the volume of the brain was quite large.

According to archaeological periodization, the time of the existence of a walking man corresponds to the Acheulean period. The most common tool of Nomo egestus was a hand ax - bnfas. It was an oblong instrument, pointed at one end and rounded at the other. Biface was convenient to cut, dig, hollow, scrape the skin of a dead animal. The other greatest achievement of man at that time was the mastery of fire. The oldest traces of fires date back to about 1.5 million years ago and have also been found in East Africa.

Homo egectus was destined to be the first human species to leave Africa. The oldest finds of the remains of this species in Europe and Asia are dated to approximately 1 million years ago. Even at the end of the XIX century. E. Dubois found on the island of Java the skull of a creature he called Pithecanthropus (monkey-man). At the beginning of the XX century. in the Zhoukoudian cave near Beijing, similar skulls of Sinanthropes (Chinese people) were unearthed. Several fragments of the remains of Nomo egestus (the oldest find is a jaw from Heidelberg in Germany, 600 thousand years old) and many ᴇᴦο items, incl. traces of dwellings have been discovered in a number of regions of Europe.

Nomo egestus died out about 300 thousand years ago. He was replaced Noto sieps. According to modern ideas, there were originally two subspecies of Homo sapiens. The development of one of them led to the appearance of about 130 thousand years ago Neanderthal man (Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis). Neanderthals populated all of Europe and much of Asia. At the same time, there was another subspecies, which is still little studied. It may have originated in Africa. It is the second subspecies that some researchers consider the ancestor modern man- Noto sapies. Homo sarins finally formed 40 - 35 thousand years ago. This scheme of the origin of modern man is not shared by all scientists. A number of researchers do not classify the Neanderthal as Homo sapiens. There are also adherents of the previously prevailing point of view that Homo sariens descended from the Neanderthal as a result of ᴇᴦο evolution.

Outwardly, the Neanderthal was in many ways similar to modern man. However, his height was on average smaller, and he himself was much more massive than a modern person. The Neanderthal had a low forehead and a large bony ridge hanging over the eyes.

According to archaeological periodization, the time of the existence of the Neanderthal corresponds to the Musta period (Middle Paleolithic). Muste stone products are characterized by a wide variety of types and careful processing. The biface remained the predominant tool. The most significant difference between the Neanderthal and previous human species is the presence of burials in accordance with certain rites. So, in the cave of Shanidar in Iraq, nine graves of Neanderthals were excavated. Near the dead, various stone items were found, and even the remains of a flower. All this indicates not only the existence of religious beliefs among Neanderthals, a developed system of thinking and speech, but also a complex social organization.

Human types. Settlement of ancient people. - concept and types. Classification and features of the category "Types of man. Resettlement of the most ancient people." 2015, 2017-2018.

Modern Homo sapiens or Homo sapiens originated on Earth about 60-70 thousand years ago. However, our species was preceded by many ancestors that have not survived to this day. Humanity is a single species, October 31 - November 1, 2011, its population reached 7 billion people and continues to grow. However, such a rapid growth in the population of the Earth began quite recently - about a hundred years ago (see graph). For most of its history, the number of people was no more than a million individuals on the entire planet. Where did man come from?

There are several scientific and pseudo-scientific hypotheses of its origin. The dominant hypothesis, which in fact is already a theory of the origin of our species, is the one that claims that humanity arose in equatorial Africa about 2 million years ago. At this time, the genus Man (Homo) stands out in the animal kingdom, one of the species of which is modern people. The facts confirming this theory, first of all, include paleontological finds in this territory. On no other continent of the world, except Africa, are the remains of all the ancestral forms of modern humans found. In contrast to this, it can be said that the fossilized bones of other species of the genus Man have been found not only in Africa, but also in Eurasia. However, this hardly indicates the existence of several centers of the emergence of mankind - rather, several waves of settlement on the planet of various species, of which, in the end, only ours survived. The closest form of man to our ancestors is the Neanderthal man. Our two species split from a common ancestral form about 500,000 years ago. Until now, scientists do not know for sure whether the Neanderthal is an independent species or is it a subspecies of Homo sapiens. However, it is known for certain that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (the ancestors of modern humans) lived on Earth at the same time, perhaps even their tribes interacted with each other, but Neanderthals died out several tens of thousands of years ago, and Cro-Magnons remained the only human species on the planet .
It is assumed that 74,000 years ago on Earth there was a strong eruption of the Toba volcano - in Indonesia. It has become very cold on Earth for several decades. This event led to the extinction of a large number of animal species and greatly reduced the human population, but may have been the impetus for its development. Having survived this catastrophe, humanity began to spread throughout the planet. 60,000 years ago, modern man migrated to Asia, and from there to Australia. Settled Europe 40,000 years ago. By 35,000 BC it reached the Bering Strait and migrated to North America, finally reaching the southern tip of South America 15,000 years ago.
The spread of people across the planet led to the emergence of numerous human populations that were already too distant from each other to interact with each other. Natural selection and variability led to the emergence of three large human races: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid (often a fourth, the Australoid race, is also considered here).

Modern Homo sapiens or Homo sapiens originated on Earth about 60-70 thousand years ago. However, our species was preceded by many ancestors that have not survived to this day. Humanity is a single species, with more than 6.8 billion individuals today and growing. It is projected to reach 7 billion people in 2011. However, such a rapid growth in the number of mankind began quite recently - about a hundred years ago (chart). For most of its history, the number of people was no more than a million individuals on the entire planet. Where did man come from?

There are several scientific and pseudo-scientific hypotheses of its origin. The dominant hypothesis, which in fact is already a theory of the origin of our species, is the one that claims that humanity arose in the equatorial region about 2 million years ago. At this time, the genus Man (Homo) stands out in the animal kingdom, one of the species of which is modern people. The facts confirming this theory, first of all, include paleontological finds in this territory. On no other continent of the world, except Africa, are the remains of all the ancestral forms of modern humans found. In contrast to this, we can say that the fossilized bones of other species of the genus Man were found not only in Africa, but also in. However, this hardly indicates the existence of several centers of the emergence of mankind - rather, several waves of settlement on the planet of various species, of which, in the end, only ours survived. The closest form of man to our ancestors is the Neanderthal man. Our two species split from a common ancestral form about 500,000 years ago. Until now, scientists do not know for sure whether the Neanderthal is an independent species or is it a subspecies of Homo sapiens. However, it is known for certain that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (the ancestors of modern humans) lived on Earth at the same time, perhaps even their tribes interacted with each other, but Neanderthals died out several tens of thousands of years ago, and Cro-Magnons remained the only human species on the planet .
It is assumed that 74,000 years ago, the strongest Toba occurred on Earth - in. It has become very cold on Earth for several decades. This event led to the extinction of a large number of animal species and greatly reduced the human population, but may have been the impetus for its development. Having survived this catastrophe, humanity began to spread throughout the planet. 60,000 years ago, modern man migrated to Asia, and from there to. Settled Europe 40,000 years ago. By 35,000 BC, it reached the strait and migrated to North America, finally reaching the southern tip 15,000 years ago.
The spread of people across the planet led to the emergence of numerous human populations that were already too distant from each other to interact with each other. Natural selection and variability led to the emergence of three large human races: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid (often a fourth, the Australoid race, is considered here).

A little theory about anthropogenesis

For many reasons, theoretical developments in the field of evolutionary anthropology are constantly ahead of their current level of evidence. Formed in the 19th century under the direct influence of the evolutionist theory of Darwin and finally taking shape in the first half of the 20th century, the stage theory of anthropogenesis reigned supreme for quite a long time. Its essence boils down to the following: a person in his biological development has gone through several stages, separated from each other by evolutionary leaps.

• first stage - archanthropes(Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, Atlanthropus),
• second stage - paleoanthropes(Neanderthals, whose name comes from the first discovery near the city of Neanderthal),
• third stage - neoanthrope(man of the modern species), or Cro-Magnon (named after the place where the first fossils of modern humans were found, made in the Cro-Magnon grotto).

It should be noted that this is not a biological classification, but a stadial scheme, which did not contain the entire morphological diversity of paleoanthropological finds already in the 50s. 20th century Note that the classification scheme of the family of hominids is still an area of ​​sharp scientific discussions.

The last half century, and especially the last decade of research, has brought a large number of findings that have qualitatively changed the general approach to solving the question of the immediate ancestors of man, understanding the nature and paths of the process of sapientation.

According to modern ideas, evolution is not a linear process, accompanied by several jumps, but a continuous, multi-level process, the essence of which can be graphically represented not as a tree with a single trunk, but as a bush. Thus, we are talking about network-like evolution, the essence of which is that at the same time evolutionarily unequal human beings could exist and interact, which in morphological and cultural terms stood at different levels of sapientation.

Settlement of Homo erectus and Neanderthals

Settlement map of Homo erectus in the Olduvian and Acheulian eras.

Africa, most likely, is the only area in which representatives of the species lived in the first half a million years of their existence, although they, undoubtedly, in the process of migration, could also visit neighboring regions - Arabia, the Middle East and even the Caucasus. Paleoanthropological finds in Israel (Ubeidiya site), in the Central Caucasus (Dmanisi site) allow us to speak about this with confidence. As for the territories of Southeast and East Asia, as well as the south of Europe, the appearance of representatives of the genus Homo erectus there dates back no earlier than 1.1-0.8 million years ago, and any significant settlement of them can be attributed to the end of the Lower Pleistocene, i.e. about 500 thousand years ago.

In the later stages of its history (about 300 thousand years ago), Homo erectus (archanthropes) populated all of Africa, southern Europe, and began to spread widely in Asia. Despite the fact that their populations could be separated by natural barriers, morphologically they were a relatively homogeneous group.

The era of the existence of the “archanthropes” was replaced by the appearance about half a million years ago of another group of hominids, which are often, in accordance with the previous scheme, called paleoanthropes and whose early appearance, regardless of the location of the discovery of bone remains, is attributed in the modern scheme to Homo Heidelbergensis (Heidelberg man). This species existed approximately from 600 to 150 thousand years ago.

In Europe and Western Asia, the descendants of H. Heidelbergensis were the so-called "classical" Neanderthals - who appeared no later than 130 thousand years ago and existed for at least 100 thousand years. Their last representatives lived in the mountainous regions of Eurasia as early as 30 thousand years ago, if not longer.

Resettlement of modern humans

The discussion about the origin of Homo sapiens is still very heated, modern solutions are very different from the views of even twenty years ago. In modern science, two opposing points of view are clearly distinguished - polycentric and monocentric. According to the first, the evolutionary transformation of Homo erectus into Homo sapiens took place everywhere - in Africa, Asia, Europe, with a continuous, continuous exchange of genetic material between the populations of these territories. According to another, the place of formation of neoanthropes was a quite definite region, from where their resettlement took place, associated with the destruction or assimilation of autochthonous populations of hominids. Such a region, according to scientists, is South and East Africa, where the remains of Homo sapiens are of the greatest antiquity (the skull of Omo 1, discovered near the northern coast of Lake Turkan in Ethiopia and dating back about 130 thousand years, the remains of neoanthropes from the caves of Klasies and Beder on southern Africa, dating back to about 100 thousand years old). In addition, a number of other East African sites contain finds comparable in age to those mentioned above. In northern Africa, such early remains of neoanthropes have not yet been discovered, although there are a number of finds of very advanced individuals in the anthropological sense, which date back to an age well over 50 thousand years.

Outside of Africa, finds of Homo sapiens, similar in age to finds from South and East Africa, were found in the Middle East; they come from the Israeli caves of Skhul and Qafzeh and date back to 70 to 100 thousand years ago.

In other regions of the world, Homo sapiens finds older than 40-36 thousand years old are still unknown. There are a number of reports of earlier finds in China, Indonesia and Australia, but all of them either do not have reliable dates or come from poorly stratified sites.

Thus, to date, the hypothesis of the African ancestral home of our species seems to be the most probable, because it is there that there is the maximum number of finds that allow us to trace in sufficient detail the transformation of local archanthropes into paleoanthropes, and the latter into neoanthropes. Genetic studies and molecular biology data, according to most researchers, also point to Africa as the original center of the emergence of Homo sapiens. Calculations by geneticists, aimed at determining the probable time of the appearance of our species, say that this event could occur in the period from 90 to 160 thousand years ago, although earlier dates sometimes appear.

Leaving aside the controversy about the exact time of the appearance of people of the modern type, it should be said that the wide distribution outside Africa and the Middle East began, judging by anthropological data, not earlier than 50-60 thousand years ago, when they mastered the southern regions of Asia and Australia. In Europe, people of the modern type penetrated 35-40 thousand years ago, where then for almost 10 thousand years they coexisted with the Neanderthals. In the process of their settlement, different populations of Homo sapiens had to adapt to a variety of natural conditions, which resulted in the accumulation of more or less clear biological differences between them, which led to the formation of modern races. It cannot be ruled out that contacts with the local population of the developed regions, which, apparently, was anthropologically rather motley, could have had a certain influence on the latter process.

From all these data on anthropology, archeology and DNA, it now follows that about 150 thousand years ago there lived a “mitochondrial Eve”, who was the “mother” of all living people. This woman lived in Northeast Africa in a small tribe of ancient people. Further, it seems that 80-100 thousand years ago there was the first migration of people from Africa to the Middle East, and after that the second, more extensive migration from Africa, which led to the formation of all the human races that we have today. This migration is shown in Fig. 7.4, and most likely began somewhere 50-60 thousand years ago. The date about 50,000 years ago is important because at this time, it seems, in places occupied by people, there was an explosion of creative activity. Instead of just primitive stone tools, archaeologists are beginning to find cave paintings, beads, sculptures, and signs of animistic or shamanic beliefs.

Let us now follow Fig. 7.4 behind the migrations of people around the world. But before we get started, there are two things to note.

1) Based on the results of DNA studies of thousands of people in different population groups around the world, it has been irrefutably shown that all of humanity belongs to the same species, Homo sapiens. Neanderthals and other varieties Homo belong to other species. These discoveries are consistent with what the Bible says about the unity of the human race: “From one blood He made the whole human race to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). The Greek word ἁίμα (blood) implies a single relationship.

2) DNA data is not the only basis for plotting migration patterns. Data on DNA are also supported by archeology and linguistics. For example, the age of the remains of people found by archaeologists in Northern Australia is estimated at about 30-40 thousand years, which generally coincides with the date of the beginning of migrations from Africa - about 50-60 thousand years ago. The settlement of people was also traced according to linguistic data. For example, linguists have hypothesized three separate waves of migration to the Americas based on studies of various Indian languages. These three waves, identified on linguistic grounds, have now been confirmed by DNA studies. However, archaeological and linguistic data, by their very nature, can only hint at the past, while DNA genetics, in its importance as a method of tracing the migrations of people in the past, far exceeds them.

Let us now turn to the map of the settlement of people in Fig. 7.4. As Brian Sykes, author of The Seven Daughters of Eve, writes, the DNA development chain leads to the African Kung people (San Bushmen), some of whose ancestors are thought to have left Northeast Africa about 50 thousand years ago. The Kung people no longer live in this northeastern region of Africa because during the expansion of the agricultural peoples of the Bantu from 1000 BC. to 1000 AD they were forced into the drier regions of South Africa. However, the DNA trace indicates that genetically the Kung are the ancestors of all other human populations. The Kung people use click sounds in their language, and some linguists suggest that such click speech may be a remnant of a very ancient language spoken by the first people.

It is believed that the peoples who left Northeast Africa about 50 thousand years ago crossed the Red Sea and during the last ice age, when the sea level, as you know, was much lower than today, moved along the coasts of Arabia, India and Indonesia . Then the generations of these nomadic peoples moved to Australia and New Guinea about 40 thousand years ago, and about 30 thousand years ago to Tasmania. This correlates with the fact that Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, and some Indian populations are more similar in appearance and DNA to Africans than to other groups of people. But even at this early stage, migration to Australia seems to have been partly by boat (raft, canoe?), because the coastline then, despite lower sea levels, did not completely link Indonesia to Australia.

Around the same time (about 30-45 thousand years ago), Negroid tribes migrated from the "cradle" in Northeast Africa to the south and west of Africa (Fig. 7.4). The vast Sahara desert prevented most Negroids from moving north, and the area was later occupied by other groups of people.

The "second wave" of humans settled in the Middle East about 45,000 years ago, and from there part of it moved west and northwest into Europe, where it reached about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. There is an opinion that the Basque people in Spain and France may belong to this first group of ancient people, because they are genetically and linguistically different from the populations around them. The Basque language is not related to any other European languages, nor any other.

Another part of the people migrated from the Middle East to China and Mongolia, reaching there about 35-40 thousand years ago. At a later time (about 12 thousand years ago), part of this population moved to Japan (the Ainu), and then, much later, a larger group of the population came to Japan from Korea, displacing the ancient people of the Ainu to the northernmost island. From the northeast of Siberia, nomadic Mongolian tribes (such as the modern Chukchi, following the reindeer migrations) crossed the Bering Strait into North America about 18,000 to 20,000 years ago. These "New World" peoples spread across the Americas, reaching the Amazon about 10,000 years ago and the tip of South America about 8,000 years ago. This migration across the Bering Strait 20,000 years ago occurred during the "last glacial maximum" when sea levels were very low. This first wave of immigrants to America is called by the name of the language group Amerindian migration, and most of the tribal groups of North American Indians, as well as all South American Indians, are descended from this group.

The second wave of Indian migration came from Mongolia to Alaska and Canada about 12 thousand years ago, and from there around 1000 AD. moved to the west of the USA (Arizona, New Mexico). These are the peoples on the day(Navajo and Apache). The Na-Dene peoples speak a language that is not similar to the languages ​​of the earlier Amerindian tribes, except for a few common root words that can be traced back to Mongolia. For example, the Hopi, descended from the ancient Anasassi people (Amerindians), and the Navajo people (Na-Dene) speak different languages, although they often live very close to each other.

The third and most recent wave of immigration to the Americas was the Aleuts and Eskimos (shaded area in Figure 7.4). However, all these three waves of migration of aboriginal peoples had almost the same