Homo Sapiens is a species of primate belonging to the hominin family. Homo sapiens are indisputably considered to be those that possess both the anatomical characteristics of current human populations and what is defined as “modern behavior” and falls within the process of hominization of man. The oldest remains of Homo sapiens are those of Omo I, called Kibish men, (Ethiopia) with 195,000 years. The oldest evidence of modern behavior is that of Pinnacle Point (South Africa) with 165,000 years. Do you want to know more about the Homo Sapiens – Origin, characteristics, food and tools? Keep reading.
The Homo Sapiens name means “wise man” and it is the name of the species to which all men living on Earth today belong. Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa about 195,000-200,000 years ago. Therefore, the precise dating of the earliest specimens of sapiens, traditionally placed about 130,000 years ago, has been pushed back in time, thanks to recent finds in Ethiopia.
70 million years ago, among the mammalian animals, different types of monkeys called primates developed.. The first primates were small in size, nocturnal and arboreal in habit, but little by little they evolved, until they achieved some anatomical characteristics that, as a whole, allow them to be identified.
Characteristics of Homo Sapiens
The Homo sapiens stood between 160 and 170 cm tall and had a stocky, muscular build. He had a low, flat forehead, small eyebrows, a smaller nose and jaw than his predecessors, a receding chin, and a less prominent face.
It had strong hands and arms and very strong teeth for tearing flesh and holding objects. Physically, therefore, he was quite similar to us.
Their bone structure, hair and skin color began to differentiate to adapt to different environmental conditions, thus managing to populate the entire Earth.
The Homo sapiens had a highly developed brain, as large as that of modern man. And it is thanks to its intelligence that it was able to better meet its needs, even in a period of extremely hostile climatic conditions such as that of the ice ages. Specifically, he had a larger cranial volume between 1,500 and 1,600 cm³, a higher forehead since they lacked a supraorbital arch, the short jawthe small teeth and pronounced chinthe appearance of the new hominid was totally different from that of its ancestors and relatives.
already had a large ability to associate ideas and for speech, derived from its cranial architecture, and this, without a doubt, gave it a certain advantage over the archaic subspecies of Homo sapiens with which it came to coexist and over which, genetically, it ended up prevailing.
Thanks to its ability to adapt, its cultural superiority and its evolved social organization, the population of Homo sapiens soon began to grow and spread successfully to other regions of Africa and Eurasia.
In Palestine, for example, there are remains of modern humans dating back 100,000 years. And in Europe, the oldest evidence, located in the Balkan area, is from about 40,000 years ago.
But unlike Homo erectus, which had also migrated to these regions almost a million years earlier, the Homo sapiens first left the Old World and began a land colonization period never stepped on by another hominid, reached Oceania about 55,000 years ago and even the American continent about 40,000 years ago.
In paleontology, the cultures developed by these societies of genetically modern men fall within the so-called Upper Paleolithic, a period of prehistory characterized by the appearance of the first artistic manifestations, for the creation of new stone and bone tools specialized, for composite tool manufacturing and for the awakening of the religious beliefs.
homo sapiens It has a series of characteristics common to the branch from which primate comes, we are going to list which are the main ones:
- Hands and feet with five fingers.
- Plantigrade feet.
- Opposable thumb on hands and feet (some species, such as man, have lost the ability to oppose the big toe).
- Clavicles present.
- Flat nails instead of claws.
- Color vision.
- Well developed shoulder and elbow joints.
- Well-developed cerebral hemispheres.
- Binocular vision (to varying degrees).
- Eye sockets surrounded by bone.
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Evolution of Homo Sapiens
We have always heard the typical reasoning «if men come from apes, why haven’t apes evolved like men? The answer is very simple, human beings have not evolved from any species of “monkey”.
our father was homo antecessorour grandfather homo ergaster, preceded by the homo habilis And if we go far enough back in time, we end up discovering that we have an ancestor that shared both human and “monkey” characteristics and that, according to biologists’ estimates, would have lived in Africa between 5 and 11 million years ago. years.
East common ancestor is the famous missing linkwhich is already more or less found. The Nakalipithecus Nakayamai, discovered by a group of Japanese archaeologists in Kenya, with an estimated age of 10 million years. Both the place and the date agree with the estimates, so there are strong reasons to say that this is the common ancestor between the rest of the apes and humans.
This possible common ancestor was neither an ape nor a hominidbut its population began to evolve into two different branches, one that would end up becoming the current chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, and another totally different one that ended up giving rise to humans.
From the common trunk of primates, two branches of monkeys arose:
- the apes: chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan
- hominids or protohumans, giving rise to the current man
THE APES
Chimpanzees and Bonobos: They are omnivores and social, their brains have a third of the mass of ours, despite this it can be said that they have some intelligence. They are very small animals, so they could not manage to hunt large prey that would provide them with the necessary proteins to develop the brain, they are animals that do not organize themselves to go hunting, therefore, animals that are incapable of devising strategies, for which they would not exercise their intelligence either.
The common relative from which they separated as independent branches and which would give rise to an evolution in a different way, until reaching the species that we now know, were the Sahelanthropus tchadensis, a species of extinct hominid whose fossils were found in the desert of the Djurab.
Gorillas: They are herbivores, their weight ranges between 135 and 180 kg. They are capable of using tools and have tremendous strength. They have a strictly vegetarian diet, which means that, as they are so large, they have to spend practically all day eating leaves in order to get the calories they need to live.
Spending so much time eating prevents you from developing intelligenceas to be able to manufacture more complex utensils, requires meditation and tests or trials of efficacy. The last relative shared by early hominids and gorillas was the Nakalipithecus (Nakalipithecus), extinct genus of mammalian primate in the family Hominidae that lived in the early Late Miocene (about ten million years ago) in what is now Kenya.
THE HOMINIDS
as we have seen the hominin family arises as a division of the group of primates, hominids began their evolution 15 million years ago to the present man, while the family of orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees has hardly changed. The species that represented true evolutionary leaps, that is, true moments of change, which were the following:
The Australopithecus, is considered the first bipedal hominid. It had powerful jaws and strong molars, its long limbs. Brain with a volume of less than 400 cm3. Height not greater than 1.20 m and 30 kg in weight. The first Australopithecus was found in Ethiopia and she was called Lucy.
Homo habilis: Due to the climatic variations that we know, we know that it was conducive to the growth of grasslands, which forced to adopt a more upright position, since they had to stop on their feet to spot possible dangers, it is even believed that he could have spoken. They had a larger brain, about 750 cubic centimeters.
its characteristic more important was change in the way you eat they no longer only ate fruits and vegetables but also animals, Homo Habilis, he became a scavenger. Fossil remains were found in Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) next to the first utensils. Antiquity: 2 million years.
homo erectus: Also called Pithecanthropus erectus. Considered for a time as the direct representative of man, but today it is known that many earlier austratopithecines had similar features.
They are the first hominids widely distributed over the planet’s surface. The characteristics of Homo Erectus are a tall body, thick eyebrows and large muscles. They had a brain larger than that of homo habilis, about 1,100 cubic centimeters. They discovered the use of fire and made the first hand ax. The first homo erectus was found in Java (Oceania) at the end of the last century. Antiquity: 1.5 million years.
homo sapiens: He lived in Europe, Africa and Asia. Archaeological findings reflect important changes in the behavior of this species: use of more elaborate stone and bone instruments, changes in the ways of hunting, use and control of fire, use of clothing, increase in the size of populations, ritual and artistic manifestations. The oldest representative of homo sapiens is Neanderthal man (Germany). Antiquity: From 150,000 to 200,000 years.
Homo sapiens sapiens: His physical characteristics are the same as those of modern man. His brain capacity is around 1,400 cubic centimeters. It is believed that it appeared in Europe around 40,000 years ago. Homo sapiens sapiens is the one that starred, from the year 10,000 BC, very important changes in the economic and social organizationlike the first forms of agriculture and domestication of animals, and life in cities. Its most faithful representative is Cro-Magnon man (France). Antiquity: From 80,000 to 40,000 years.
Feeding of Homo Sapiens
When the ancestors of homo sapiens they lived in the trees eating berries, fruits and leaves, so abundant in vitamin C, they probably lost the metabolic capacity that other mammals have to synthesize this vitamin in their own body, so necessary to avoid scurvy, among other diseases, although before they seem to have lost the ability to digest cellulose.
All this is…