Evolution of modern humans

Question 1

How did people first get to Australia?

Answer 1

• Ice-house world, low sea level
• Even with low sea level to get to Aus they would have needed to island hop
• Some islands 30 miles apart
• Further than can be seen on horizon
• Must have been good sailors

Question 2

Where did the first people to get to Australia come from?

Answer 2

Genetic evidence for suggests they came from Africa

Question 3

Other notes on Aus

Answer 3

• Mungo man - 50 Ka
• First evidence of cremations
• People changed environment by burning
• Megafauna in australia were wiped out at the same time humans came

Question 4

How did people first get to the Americas?

Answer 4

• People tracked across the tundra
• Mammoth step (huge tundra of grassland)
• People followed/tracked mammoths over eurasia and reached the Americas
• 30,000 Ka
• Throught glacier corridor

Question 5

What does the Clovis site sugget?

Answer 5

• Site where distinct flint tools are found
• Lots of clovis tools found all over
• Possible population boom

Question 6

Human inteligence

Answer 6

• Brain expansion related to a mothers metabolic rate and longer gestation period and smaller litter size.
• Brain 2% weight and uses up around 20% of energy
• Big brain needs stable, high energy food supply
• Birth problems
• Length of pregnancy and extended childhood
• Lower length of pregnancy - couldn’t birth a more developed form
• Extended childhood - so brain can continue developing once born

Question 7

Speech/Language: Hyoid bone

Answer 7

• Bone in neck that holds back of tongue
• Similar seen in heidelbergensis, habilis, neanderthals.
• Different in erectus

Question 8

Speech/language: Larynx /Pharynx

Answer 8

• Adams apple much lower that it should be
• Controls air in neck for speech
• Cost of this is choking

Question 9

Speech/language: GENES

Answer 9

• FOXP2
• People that can’t speak don’t have this gene
• Remove FOXP2 from mice and they lose ability to squeak
• Area of research to keep an eye on

Question 11

First evidnce for Art

Answer 11

• First shown in neanderthals and sapiens
• Ochre 100,000 Ka
• Bright colours
• Cave paintings - 33,500 - 10,000 Ka (coincides with ice age)
• Animals & hands
• Humans depicted much later
• Figurines 35,000 Ka (e.g. the venuses)
• Sungir - buried with 2936 ivory beads

Question 12

Key dates in human developement

Answer 12

• 100,000 Jewellery (shell beads) from the Levant and North Africa
• 40,000 Flutes (music) discovered in Europe
• 30,000 Wild flax used (?to manufacture clothing)
• 20,000 Pottery
• 15,000 Dogs domesticated among hunter-gatherer population

Question 13

Cultivation and crops etc

Answer 13

• Villages, Agriculture, Animals domestication
• Huts made out of mammoth bones
• People learnt how to live independently by growing crops
• Happens separately in different populations/cultures
• Agricultural neolithic revolution
• Neolithic supernova