When and did the first actual humans homo sapien sapien appear?
Where did it come from?

I figure the first homo sapien sapien appeared in Atlantis or Africa. Then they had children, and their numbers grew. Eventually, they spread all over the world.

Atlantis? :bugeye:

The Olduvai Gorge in Africa is where the earliest remains of humans have been found.

http://www.sfu.ca/archaeology/museum/olduvai/index2.html

Kenya and Ethiopia specifically are the cradle of mankind

Vocabulary comparison made possible by the advent of massively parallel multiprocessing has greatly advanced the science of linguistics.

Research performed in just the past five years on the analysis of the vocabularies of the world's languages has found relationships that were never dreamed of. For example, the Ural-Altaic-Finno-Ugric family that spreads from Finland to Turkey to Mongolia is related to our own Indo-European family. At this point the evidence indicates that there are at most two language families, instead of the dozens or hundreds that were formerly assumed.

In another few years, we will know whether the two might be related and that there is only one. All languages may be descended from a single ancestor that we brought with us from Africa, instead of springing up spontaneously in multiple locations.

If this is true, it would indicate that language may have been the one invention that allowed Homo sapiens to finally venture out from the relative comfort of Africa, and populate every significant land mass on Earth except Antartica.

And we've at least been sending cruise ships down there. :)

Try a search for the website

"walking with cavemen" by the BBC.

It should tell you everything you want to know, and more :p

Based on fossil evidence, there is little doubt that Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa and spread from there.

That's what they'd like us to think, but both you and I know that the human species proliferated outward from Atlantis.

We wouldn't be in Atlantis unless the spaceship from the dog star Sirius dropped us off. Obviously!

So the first homo sapien sapien first appeared in Africa, and not Atlantis? Where in Africa? What date is speculated to be the time when they first appeared? What path did they take from there in order to end up populating most of the world?

Though a little off topic, your insights about language are always interesting. Keep studying! It is always nice to meet new friends that know a great of interesting stuff. By the way, what are the two families?

I think the first homo-sapiens are thought to have arisen in east africa in what is known as ethiopia today, not sure of the date speculated exactly, i think its only something like a million years ago though. Could be wrong. For some reason I know its either 4 millions years ago, 2 million years ago, 1 million years ago, or 600 000 years ago.
I don't know why but I know its one of them, can't remember which. 600 000 sounds a little suspect.
They probably stayed there for a long time, very gradually branching out around africa.
And in fact populating the world would have been a fairly slow process. Sped up a little more than other animals due to the discovery of farming which allowed them to go places where their usual food sources weren't.
But not different to other animals in any particularly significant way.
When the british started setting out to find other countries is where it all started snowballing.
The people before them weren't trying to go to other countries, they just naturally spread around the globe like other animals.
For some reason humans purposefully migrating to other continents had a wierd affect on the world.

So the first homo sapien sapien first appeared in Africa, and not Atlantis?There's an island in the eastern Mediterranean that was destroyed by a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions during the classical Greek period. Since it happened iteratively, a good portion of its population was able to flee to other lands. Its civilization was as advanced as any in the region. It is certainly the source of the Atlantis myths. It's likely that the Greek explorers who made it to Gibraltar named the Atlantic Ocean after the mythical Atlantis, rather than vice versa. Forgive me for not being able to find the bookmark for this subject. When I do I'll provide it.What path did they take from there [Africa]in order to end up populating most of the world?The first part is easy, the only way out of Africa on foot was across the Isthmus of Suez. If the world was in an ice age the Red Sea would have been pretty shrunken, but even as wide as it is today it leaves an easy-to-find route. From there the rest of Eurasia was pretty much a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. I don't know which region has the oldest evidence of habitation by H. sapiens, but the Indo-European ethnic group that now dominates much of the area is a relative newcomer, spreading out of its homeland around the east end of Anatolia no more than four or five thousand years ago. They seem to have encountered and displaced earlier tribes of sapiens just about everywhere, e.g. the Etruscans, the Harappans, the builders of Stonehenge, the rest of the clan that included the Basques. Sapiens landed in Australia about 40,000BCE.

Estimates differ on their arrival in the Americas; the first wave -- the Athabascans who are the ancestors of all the native peoples south of the Rio Grande and most of the ones east of the Rockies -- came over sometime between 20,000BCE (which would have been by boat following the coastline) and 12,000BCE (which would have been on foot across the Bering Land Bridge that existed during that Ice Age). There are some anomalous campsites in South America that predate this migration. It could be an earlier group that didn't survive or explorers who came across the ocean from Africa or Asia.By the way, what are the two [language] families?All I know is that they call the one that has been studied most thoroughly "Eurasiatic". It combines Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Mongol-Japanese-Korean-Finno-Ugric-Ural-Altaic, and I think Semitic-Hamitic. I can't remember which one the languages of Africa, the New World, the Caucasus, Malayo-Polynesian, Australian, etc. fall into.

And in fact populating the world would have been a fairly slow process. Sped up a little more than other animals due to the discovery of farming which allowed them to go places where their usual food sources weren't.Agriculture is an extremely recent discovery, late Neolithic, no evidence anywhere earlier than about 8,000 BCE. Modern man had made it to every major land mass by then, including Australia and the New World. Did it all by just hunting and gathering.

The appearance of the first multi-species community, Homo sapiens and Canis familiaris, was a huge boost to the prosperity of both species due to the enormously improved effectiveness of cooperative hunting, but that only happened in 10,000 BCE. Still way too late to have any bearing on our entrenchment all over the globe.

Kenya and Ethiopia specifically are the cradle of mankind
Isn't it some where near Iraq or some shit like that.

No, that's Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization, not of mankind.

Mankind was "born" in Kenya or Ethiopia or somwhere thereabouts.

No they say the cradle of CIVILISATION is in iraq or some shit, not mankind, thats ethiopia/kenya/tanzania(one of them).

Fraggle, no arguments from here. Thats actually what I thought but then I remembered how the massai drove cattle and for some reason that made me assume we must have had farming before we left africa. But yeah I guess someone showed it to them later or they independently developed it themselves.

Do you know where man apparently first joined forces with canis familiaris? In which geographic location?
Also(you might not know this) but are there any wolf fossils in america from before humans were thought to have spread there?
I'm curious if perhaps it is similar to the dingo/aborigine relationship that migrated to australia. In that wolves followed north american indians over there(or vice versa).
It seems reasonable to assume from the indications that humans and canines were 'relying' on eachother for some time before they actually joined teams and lived together.
Its kind of cool.
More people should have dogs IMO, you're an incomplete organism without one.

No they say the cradle of CIVILISATION is in iraq or some shit, not mankind, thats ethiopia/kenya/tanzania(one of them).


Good job.

You just repeated what a wrote.

aaahh yeah, what rappaccini said :o

Damn you and your quick posting.

I had to backtrack and remove the insults from my post when you proved to be a rational person.

I don't like having to do that.

Yes, my plan all along was to inconvenience you. Thats the only reason I ever posted in this thread. I don't even care about the origin of man:cool:

Do you know where man apparently first joined forces with canis familiaris? In which geographic location?It was in what is now China. I can't remember which part. Interestingly, it only happened once. They checked the DNA of the wolves that still live in that part of China and it turns out that all dogs are descended from their ancestors. People brought dogs with them everywhere they went. They did not domesticate them independently.

To me this is almost as important a point as the development of language. I believe that the first humans who learned to live in a multi-species community had a significant advantage. After all, if you can love a "person" who is not even of your own species, it perhaps becomes a little easier to love somebody who merely speaks a different language, has different colored skin, or believes in a different god. Could we have achieved what we have today, the ability to care about people on the other side of the planet that we'll never see or hear, who are mere abstractions, if we hadn't first developed the ability to care about the animals who started joining our hunting parties because we could both see the advantages of pooling our talents? It's possible that civilization might not exist if it hadn't been for dogs.

Also(you might not know this) but are there any wolf fossils in america from before humans were thought to have spread there?Yes. Wolves spread to North America before the ancestors of the Aztecs got here fifteen to twenty thousand years ago. But the Indians did not domesticate them. The first wave of human migration to the New World occurred before dogs joined forces with humans in China. So the Athabascans had no dogs. The second wave of migration, the Na-Dene around 4000BCE, brought dogs with them, as did the third wave, the Eskimo-Aleuts around 2000BCE. It appears that although the domesticated dogs in western North America (the range of the Na-Dene peoples) crossed the Rockies before the Europeans arrived, they did not spread very far southward. The "indigenous" breeds of dogs in Central and South America, such as the Chihuahua, are clearly of Chinese origin. They are either the result of Chinese adventurers sailing to the New World before the Europeans, failing to establish colonies or even make much of a wave at all, but leaving some dogs behind -- or they were brought over during the very early period of European exploration by sailors who had been to the Orient.I'm curious if perhaps it is similar to the dingo/aborigine relationship that migrated to australia. In that wolves followed north american indians over there(or vice versa).No, the wolves (and coyotes) were here first. But like the later domesticated dogs, they apparently didn't go south either. I don't think there are any indigenous wild canines very far south of Mexico.It seems reasonable to assume from the indications that humans and canines were 'relying' on each other for some time before they actually joined teams and lived together.Yeah. They surely started out by hunting together and sharing the kill. The dogs could smell prey miles away, run fast enough to keep up with it, and harrass it until the humans arrived to finish it off with their incredible pointy things. Probably later the dogs kept coming closer to the human camps and discovered our weird habit of leaving perfectly good food lying all over the ground. The humans must have loved the decrease in flies and scavengers, and the dogs must have loved the campfires. The dogs were willing to risk their lives to fend off huge predators, and the human females would take care of the puppies while the adult dogs went hunting. I'm sure it was the young of both species who cemented the relationship and turned it into one of love.Its kind of cool. More people should have dogs IMO, you're an incomplete organism without one.Amen. Even if my scenario is exaggerated, there's no question that dogs played a major role in the development of human society. Cats, pigs, goats, and other scavengers and/or pest control specialists eventually joined us voluntarily as well, but dogs have a six thousand year head start on all of them.

If anybody wants a reason to believe the Muslim fundamentalists are as wacky as Daffy Duck, how about the fact that they believe dogs are unclean and don't allow people to have them except for herding and hunting? Talk about denying your heritage as a human being!

btw, speaking of DNA. DNA testing has proven that dogs and wolves are a single species. The difference in DNA between the average mongrel dog and a wolf is less than that between two extreme breeds of dogs, which in turn is far less than that between a human in Norway and one in Borneo. Wolves are simply one breed of dog: the earliest. The only important non-behavioral difference between a wolf and a dog is that the dog has adapted to the lower protein diet of a scavenger. Less protein and less hunting means a smaller brain and smaller teeth.

This is all fine and all but what about the origin of woman? Didn't some guy make one with a rib or something?

This is all fine and all but what about the origin of woman? Didn't some guy make one with a rib or something?

Actually that story has been distorted a bit through the ages. In fact, Adam was hungry for ribs so God sent down some chick to do the cooking. The rest is history. :)

On the subject of the routes out of Africa, I read in Scientific American (I think it was) that there is evidence that the mediterranean was actually cut off from the atlantic several times during various ice ages. I'm sure it never completely dried up, but it opened a lot more routes than just the suez. Then when the ice receded once more, there was the largest waterfall in the world at the straits of gibraltar. That would have been something to see. I think it also mentioned in the article that it's possible that this is how humans originally got to crete.

So it was in ethiopia that the first homo appeared. In the year 600,000bc. Then it spread to other parts of the world.

I read that there is evidence that the Mediterranean was actually cut off from the Atlantic several times during various ice ages. I think it also mentioned in the article that it's possible that this is how humans originally got to Crete.Interesting that you mention Crete. There was a report in today's paper about the discovery of gravesites in Crete in which cats were buried with people. Nothing remarkable about that, they started doing it in Egypt around 4500BC, which is the generally accepted estimated date of the first domestication of cats.

Except that these graves in Crete are from 8000BC. That means that cats were domesticated 4000 years earlier than previously known. Cats were not native to Crete, so it means the human settlers brought them in their boats. It also means that agriculture was flourishing ten thousand years ago: the only reason that cats were interested in and permitted to join our growing multi-species community was because of the rodents that kept stealing our grain.

This puts cats much closer to dogs in terms of their history with us, just a couple of millennia apart in the date of their earliest domestication.

Prior to this it had seemed that pigs and goats had become camp-followers long before cats because they are scavengers that were attracted by our garbage and were welcomed because they are good to eat.

Yet cats and dogs share a nearly identical special place in our hearts and our collective unconscious that is closed to pigs and goats. It was odd that cats, who are not social animals like humans and dogs and therefore undoubtedly took longer to form a bond that was based on more than services rendered, could have achieved this status in only half the time that dogs have been around.

This new dating puts the pieces of the puzzle together in a more satisfying way.

This by no means contradicts the hypothesis that humans had already reached Crete via a land bridge during an ice age. There might very well have been a Mesolithic tribe living there happily when the boats showed up. Since the newcomers did not have bronze weapons with which to overwhelm the natives, we can hope that their encounter and assimilation was more peaceful than similar events which occurred during historical times.