Практика Shadowing: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari | Read by Derek Perkins | Penguin Audiobooks - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео
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Brought to you by Penguin Sapiens,
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a brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harari Read by Derek Perkins Part 1.
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The Cognitive Revolution 1.
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An Animal of No Significance About 13.5 billion years ago,
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matter, energy, time, and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang.
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The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.
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About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures called atoms.
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which then combined into molecules.
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The story of atoms, molecules, and their interactions is called chemistry.
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About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms.
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The story of organisms is called biology.
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About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures.
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The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.
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Three important revolutions shaped the course of history.
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The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago.
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The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago.
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The Scientific Revolution, which got underway only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.
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This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.
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There were humans long before there was history.
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Animals much like modern humans first appeared about 2.5 million years ago.
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But for countless generations they did not stand out from the myriad other organisms with which they shared their habitats.
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On a hike in East Africa two million years ago, you might well have encountered a familiar cast of human characters, anxious mothers cuddling their babies,
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and clutches of carefree children playing in the mud, temperamental youths chafing against the dictates of society,
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and weary elders who just wanted to be left in peace, chest-thumping machos trying to impress the local beauty,
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and wise old matriarchs who had already seen it all.
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These archaic humans loved, played, formed close relationships, and competed for status and power,
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but so did chimpanzees, baboons, and elephants.
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There was nothing special about humans.
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Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon,
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split the atom, fathom the genetic code, and write history books.
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The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is
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that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies, or jellyfish.
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Biologists classify organisms into species.
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Animals are said to belong to the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring.
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Horses and donkeys have a recent common ancestor and share many physical traits, but they show little sexual interest in one another.
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They will mate if induced to do so, but their offspring, called mules, are sterile.
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Mutations in donkey DNA can therefore never cross over to horses or vice versa.
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The two types of animals are consequently considered two distinct species, moving along separate evolutionary paths.
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By contrast, a bulldog and a spaniel may look very different, but they are members of the same species, sharing the same DNA pool.
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They will happily mate, and their puppies will grow up to pair off with other dogs and produce more puppies.
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Species that evolved from a common ancestor are bunched together under the heading genus, plural genera.
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Lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars are different species within the genus panthera.
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Biologists label organisms with a two-part Latin name, genus followed by species.
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Lions, for example, are called panthera leo, the species leo of the genus panthera.
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Presumably everyone listening to this book is a Homo sapiens, the species sapiens, wise, of the genus homo, man.
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Genera in their turn are grouped into families, such as the cats, lions, cheetahs, housecats, the dogs, wolves,
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foxes, jackals, and the elephants, elephants, mammoths, mastodons.
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All members of a family trace their lineage back to a founding matriarch or patriarch.
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All cats, for example, from the smallest house kitten to the most ferocious lion, share a common feline ancestor who lived about 25 million years ago.
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Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a family.
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This banal fact used to be one of history's most closely guarded secrets.
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Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, an orphan bereft of family,
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lacking siblings or cousins, and, most importantly, without parents.
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But that's just not the case.
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Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the Great Apes.
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Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.
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The chimpanzees are the closest.
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Just six million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters.
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One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees.
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The other is our own grandmother.
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Skeletons in the Closet Homo sapiens has kept hidden an even more disturbing secret.
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Not only do we possess an abundance of uncivilized cousins, once upon a time we had quite a few brothers and sisters as well.
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We are used to thinking about ourselves as the only humans, because for the last ten thousand years our species has indeed been the only human species around.
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Yet the real meaning of the word human is an animal belonging to the genus Homo,
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and there used to be many other species of this genus besides Homo sapiens.
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Moreover, as we shall see in the last chapter of the book, in the not-so-distant future we might again have to contend with non-sapiens humans.
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To clarify this point, I will often use the term sapiens to denote members of the species Homo sapiens,
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while reserving the term human to refer to all extant members of the genus Homo.
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Humans first evolved in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago from an earlier genus of apes called Australopithecus,
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which means southern ape.
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About two million years ago, some of these archaic men and women left their homeland to journey through and settle vast areas of North Africa,
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Europe, and Asia.
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Since survival in the snowy forests of northern Europe required different traits than those needed to stay alive in Indonesia's steaming jungles,
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human populations evolved in different directions.
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The result was several distinct species, to each of which scientists have assigned a pompous Latin name.
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Humans in Europe and Western Asia evolved into Homo neanderthalensis, man from the Neander Valley,
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popularly referred to simply as Neanderthals.
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Neanderthals, bulkier and more muscular than us sapiens, were well adapted to the cold climate of Ice Age western Eurasia.
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The more eastern regions of Asia were populated by Homo erectus, upright man, who survived there for close to two million years,
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making it the most durable human species ever.
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This record is unlikely to be broken even by our own species.
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It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so two million years is really out of our league.
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On the island of Java in Indonesia lived Homo soloensis, man from the Solo Valley, who was suited to life in the tropics.
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On another Indonesian island, the small island of Flores, archaic humans underwent a process of dwarfing.
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Humans first reached Flores when the sea level was exceptionally low, and the island was easily accessible from the mainland.
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When the seas rose again, some people were trapped on the island, which was poor in resources.
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Big people, who need a lot of food, died first.
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Smaller fellows survived much better.
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Over the generations, the people of Flores became dwarves.
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This unique species, known by scientists as Homo floresiensis, reached a maximum height of only 3.5 feet,
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and weighed no more than 55 pounds.
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They were nevertheless able to produce stone tools, and even managed occasionally to hunt down some of the island's elephants,
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though, to be fair, the elephants were a dwarf species as well.
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In 2010, another lost sibling was rescued from oblivion when scientists excavating the Denisova cave in Siberia discovered a fossilized finger bone.
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Genetic analysis proved that the finger belonged to a previously unknown human species, which was named Homo denisova.
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Who knows how many lost relatives of ours are waiting to be discovered in other caves, on other islands, and in other climes.
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While these humans were evolving in Europe and Asia, evolution in East Africa did not stop.
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The cradle of humanity continued to nurture numerous new species, such as Homo rudolfensis, man from Lake Rudolph,
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Homo augaster, working man, and eventually our own species, which we've immodestly named Homo sapiens, wise man.
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The members of some of these species were massive, and others were dwarves.
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Some were fearsome hunters, and others meek plant-gatherers.
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Some lived only on a single island, while many roamed over continents.
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But all of them belonged to the genus Homo.
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They were all human beings.
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It's a common fallacy to envision these species as arranged in a straight line of descent,
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with Augusta begetting Erectus, Erectus begetting the Neanderthals and the Neanderthals evolving into us.
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This linear model gives the mistaken impression that at any particular moment only one type of human inhabited the earth,
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and that all earlier species were merely older models of ourselves.
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The truth is that from about two million years ago until around ten thousand years ago,
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the world was home at one and the same time to several human species.
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And why not?
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Today there are many species of foxes, bears, and pigs.
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The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man.
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It's our current exclusivity, not that multispecies past, that is peculiar, and perhaps incriminating.
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As we will shortly see, we sapiens have good reasons to repress the memory of our siblings.
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The Cost of Thinking Despite their many differences, all human species share several defining characteristics.
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Most notably, humans have extraordinarily large brains compared to other animals.
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Mammals weighing 130 pounds have an average brain size of 12 cubic inches.
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The earliest men and women, 2.5 million years ago, had brains of about 36 cubic inches.
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Modern sapiens sport a brain averaging 73 to 85 cubic inches.
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Neanderthal brains were even bigger.
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That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer.
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We are so enamored of our high intelligence that we assume that when it comes to cerebral power, more must be better.
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But if that were the case, the feline family would also have produced cats who could do calculus.
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and frogs would by now have launched their own space program.
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Why are giant brains so rare in the animal kingdom?
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The fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body.
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It's not easy to carry around, especially when encased inside a massive skull.
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It's even harder to fuel.
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In Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2-3% of total body weight,
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but it consumes 25% of the body's energy when the body is at rest.
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By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8% of rest-time energy.
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Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways.
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Firstly, they spent more time in search of food.
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Secondly, their muscles atrophied.
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Like a government diverting money from defense to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons.
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It's hardly a foregone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the savannah.
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A chimpanzee can't win an argument with the Homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll.
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Today our big brains pay off nicely, because we can produce cars and guns
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that enable us to move much faster than chimps and shoot them from a safe distance instead of wrestling.
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But cars and guns are a recent phenomenon.
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For more than two million years, human neural networks kept growing and growing, but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks,
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humans had precious little to show for it.
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What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those two million years?
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Frankly, we don't know.
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Another singular human trait is that we walk upright on two legs.
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Standing up, it's easier to scan the savannah for game or enemies, and arms that are unnecessary for locomotion are freed for other purposes,
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like throwing stones or signaling.
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The more things these hands could do, the more successful their owners were,
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so evolutionary pressure brought about an increasing concentration of nerves and finely tuned muscles in the palms and fingers.
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As a result, humans can perform very intricate tasks with their hands.
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In particular, they can produce and use sophisticated tools.
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The first evidence for tool production dates from about 2.5 million years ago,
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and the manufacture and use of tools are the criteria by which archaeologists recognize ancient humans.
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Yet walking upright has its downside.
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The skeleton of our primate ancestors
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developed for millions of years to support a creature that walked on all fours and had a relatively small head.
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Adjusting to an upright position was quite a challenge, especially when the scaffolding had to support an extra-large cranium.
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Humankind paid for its lofty vision and industrious hands, with backaches and stiff necks.
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Women paid extra.
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An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal, and this just when babies' heads were getting bigger and bigger.
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Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females.
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Women who gave birth earlier, when the infant's brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children.
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Natural selection consequently favored earlier births, and indeed, compared to other animals,
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humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still underdeveloped.
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A colt can trot shortly after birth.
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A kitten leaves its mother to forage on its own when it is just a few weeks old.
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Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for sustenance, protection, and education.
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This fact has contributed greatly both to humankind's extraordinary social abilities and to its unique social problems.
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Lone mothers could hardly forage enough food for their offspring and themselves with needy children in tow.
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Raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbors.
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It takes a tribe to raise a human.
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Evolution thus favored those capable of forming strong social ties.
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In addition, since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialized to a far greater extent than any other animal.
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Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln.
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Any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them.
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Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace.
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They can be spun, stretched, and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom.
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This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving.
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We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities, and complex social structures are huge advantages.
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It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth.
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But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full two million years, during which they remained weak and marginal creatures.
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Thus, humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators,
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rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals,
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and eating the carrion left behind by other, more powerful carnivores.
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One of the most common uses of early stone tools was to crack open bones in order to get to the marrow.
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Some researchers believe this was our original niche.
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Just as woodpeckers specialize in extracting insects from the trunks of trees, the first humans specialized in extracting marrow from bones.
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Why marrow?
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Well, suppose you observe a pride of lions take down and devour a giraffe.
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You wait patiently until they're done.
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But it's still not your turn, because first the hyenas and jackals, and you don't dare interfere with them, scavenge the leftovers.
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Only then would you and your band dare approach the carcass, look cautiously left and right, and dig into the edible tissue that remained.
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This is a key to understanding our history and psychology.
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Genus Homo's position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle.
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For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators.
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It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years,
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with the rise of Homo sapiens, that man jumped to the top of the food chain.
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That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences.
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Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually over millions of years.
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This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc.
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As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered.
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In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust.
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Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust.
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Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures.
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Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence.
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Sapiens, by contrast, is more like a banana republic dictator.
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Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fear and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.
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Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.
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A Race of Cooks A significant step on the way to the top was the domestication of fire.
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Some human species may have made occasional use of fire as early as 800,000 years ago.
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By about 300,000 years ago, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and the forefathers of Homo sapiens were using fire on a daily basis.
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Humans now had a dependable source of light and warmth, and a deadly weapon against prowling lions.
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Not long afterwards, humans may even have started deliberately to torch their neighborhoods.
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A carefully managed fire could turn impassable barren thickets into prime grasslands teeming with game.
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In addition, once the fire died down, Stone Age entrepreneurs could walk through the smoking remains and harvest charcoaled animals, nuts, and tubers.
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But the best thing fire did was cook.
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Foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms, such as wheat, rice, and potatoes, became staples of our diet thanks to cooking.
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Fire not only changed food's chemistry, it changed its biology as well.
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Cooking killed germs and parasites that infested food.
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Humans also had a far easier time chewing and digesting old favorites such as fruits, nuts, insects, and carrion if they were cooked
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Whereas chimpanzees spend five hours a day chewing raw food a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food
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The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food to devote less time to eating
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and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines
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Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal tract, and the growth of the human brain.
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Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it's hard to have both.
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By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.
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Fire also opened the first significant gulf between man and the other animals.
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The power of almost all animals depends on their bodies, the strength of their muscles, the size of their teeth, the breadth of their wings.
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Though they may harness winds and currents, they are unable to control these natural forces and are always constrained by their physical design.
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Eagles, for example, identify thermal columns rising from the ground, spread their giant wings, and allow the hot air to lift them upwards.
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Yet eagles cannot control the location of the columns, and their maximum carrying capacity is strictly proportional to their wingspan.
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When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force.
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Unlike eagles, humans could choose when and where to ignite a flame, and they were able to exploit fire for any number of tasks.
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Most importantly, the power of fire was not limited by the form, structure, or strength of the human body.
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A single woman with a flint or fire stick could burn down an entire forest in a matter of hours.
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The domestication of fire was a sign of things to come.
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Our Brothers Keepers Despite the benefits of fire, 150,000 years ago, humans were still marginal creatures.
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They could now scare away lions, warm themselves during cold nights, and burn down the occasional forest.
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Yet, counting all species together, there were still no more than perhaps a million humans living between the Indonesian archipelago and the Iberian Peninsula,
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a mere blip on the ecological radar.
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Our own species, Homo sapiens, was already present on the world stage, but so far it was just minding its own business in a corner of Africa.
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We don't know exactly where and when animals
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that can be classified as Homo sapiens first evolved from some earlier type of humans, but most scientists agree that by 150,000 years ago,
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East Africa was populated by sapiens that looked just like us.
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If one of them turned up in a modern morgue, the local pathologist would notice nothing peculiar.
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Thanks to the blessings of fire, they had smaller teeth and jaws than their ancestors, whereas they had massive brains, equal in size to ours.
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Scientists also agree that about 70,000 years ago, sapiens from East Africa spread into the Arabian Peninsula,
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and from there they quickly overran the entire Eurasian landmass.
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When Homo sapiens landed in Arabia, most of Eurasia was already settled by other humans.
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What happened to them?
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There are two conflicting theories.
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The interbreeding theory tells a story of attraction, sex, and mingling.
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As the African immigrants spread around the world, they bred with other human populations, and people today are the outcome of this interbreeding.
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For example, when sapiens reached the Middle Eastern Europe, they encountered the Neanderthals.
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These humans were more muscular than sapiens, had larger brains, and were better adapted to cold climes.
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They used tools and fire, were good hunters, and apparently took care of their sick and infirm.
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Archaeologists have discovered the bones of of Neanderthals who lived for many years with severe physical handicaps, evidence that they were cared for by their relatives.
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Neanderthals are often depicted in caricatures as the archetypical brutish and stupid cave people,
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but recent evidence has changed their image.
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According to the interbreeding theory, when sapiens spread into Neanderthal lands,
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sapiens bred with Neanderthals until the two populations merged.
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If this is the case, then today's Eurasians are not pure sapiens, they are a mixture of sapiens and Neanderthals.
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Similarly, when sapiens reached East Asia, they interbred with the local erectus, so the Chinese and Koreans are a mixture of sapiens and erectus.
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The opposing view, called the replacement theory, tells a very different story,
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one of incompatibility, revulsion, and perhaps even genocide.
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According to this theory, sapiens and other humans had different anatomies, and most likely different mating habits, and even body odors.
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They would have had little sexual interest in one another.
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And even if a Neanderthal Romeo and a sapiens Juliet fell in love, they could not produce fertile children,
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because the genetic gulf separating the two populations was already unbridgeable.
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The two populations remained completely distinct, and when the Neanderthals died out or were killed off, their genes died with them.
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According to this view, sapiens replaced all the previous human populations without merging with them.
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If that is the case,
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the lineages of all contemporary humans can be traced back exclusively to East Africa, 70,000 years ago.
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We are all pure sapiens.
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A lot hinges on this debate.
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From an evolutionary perspective, 70,000 years is a relatively short interval.
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If the replacement theory is correct, all living humans have roughly the same genetic baggage,
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and racial distinctions among them are negligible.
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But if the interbreeding theory is right, there might well be genetic differences between Africans,
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Europeans, and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years.
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This is political dynamite, which could provide material for explosive racial theories.
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In recent decades, the replacement theory has been the common wisdom in the field.
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It had firmer archaeological backing and was more politically correct.
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Scientists had no desire to open up the Pandora's box of racism by claiming significant genetic diversity among modern human populations.
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But that ended in 2010, when the results of a four-year effort to map the Neanderthal genome were published.
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Geneticists were able to collect enough intact Neanderthal DNA from fossils to make a broad comparison between it
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and the DNA of contemporary humans.
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The results stunned the scientific community.
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It turned out
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that 1 to 4% of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA.
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That's not a huge amount, but it's significant.
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A second shock came several months later, when DNA extracted from the fossilized finger from Denisovir was mapped.
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The results proved that up to 6% of the unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA.
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If these results are valid, and it's important to keep in mind that further research is underway and may either reinforce or modify these conclusions,
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the interbreeders got at least some things right.
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But that doesn't mean that the replacement theory is completely wrong.
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Since Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed only a small amount of DNA to our present-day genome,
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it is possible to speak of a merger between sapiens and other human species.
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Although differences between them were not large enough to completely prevent fertile intercourse, they were sufficient to make such contacts very rare.
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How then should we understand the biological relatedness of sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans?
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Clearly, they were not completely different species, like horses and donkeys.
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On the other hand, they were not just different populations of the same species, like bulldogs and spaniels.
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Biological reality is not black and white.
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There are also important gray areas.
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Every two species that evolved from a common ancestor, such as horses and donkeys, were at one time just two populations of the same species,
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like bulldogs and spaniels.
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There must have been a point when the two populations were already quite different from one another, but still capable on rare occasions of having sex and producing fertile offspring.
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Then another mutation severed this last connecting thread, and they went their separate evolutionary ways.
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It seems that about 50,000 years ago, Sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans were at that borderline point.
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They were almost, but not quite, entirely separate species.
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As we shall hear in the next chapter, sapiens were already very different from Neanderthals and Denisovans, not only in their genetic code and physical traits,
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but also in their cognitive and social abilities.
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Yet it appears it was still just possible, on rare occasions, for a sapiens and a Neanderthal to produce a fertile offspring.
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So the populations did not merge, but a few lucky Neanderthal genes did hitch a ride on the Sapiens Express.
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It is unsettling, and perhaps thrilling,
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to think that we Sapiens could at one time have sex with an animal from a different species and produce children together.
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But if the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other human species didn't merge with Sapiens, why did they vanish?
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One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction.
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Imagine a sapiens band reaching a Balkan valley where Neanderthals had lived for hundreds of thousands of years.
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The newcomers began to hunt the deer and gather the nuts and berries that were the Neanderthals' traditional staples.
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Sapiens were more proficient hunters and gatherers, thanks to better technology and superior social skills, so they multiplied and spread.
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The less resourceful Neanderthals found it increasingly difficult to feed themselves.
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Their population dwindled and they slowly died out, except perhaps for one or two members who joined their sapiens neighbors.
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Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide.
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Tolerance is not a sapiens trademark.
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In modern times, a small difference in skin color, dialect, or religion has been enough to prompt one group of sapiens to set about exterminating another group.
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Would ancient sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species?
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It may well be that when sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic cleansing campaign in history.
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Whichever way it happened, the Neanderthals and the other human species pose one of history's great what-ifs.
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Imagine how things might have turned out had the Neanderthals or Denisovans survived alongside Homo sapiens.
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What kind of cultures, societies, and political structures would have emerged in a world where several different human species coexisted?
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How, for example, would religious faiths have unfolded?
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Would the book of Genesis have declared that Neanderthals descend from Adam and Eve?
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Would Jesus have died for the sins of the Denisovans?
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and would the Koran have reserved seats in heaven for all righteous humans, whatever their species?
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Would Neanderthals have been able to serve in the Roman legions, or in the sprawling bureaucracy of imperial China?
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Would the American Declaration of Independence hold as a self-evident truth that all members of the genus Homo are created equal?
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Would Karl Marx have urged workers of all species to unite?
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Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species
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that it's hard for us to conceive of any other possibility.
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Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation,
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and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
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When Charles Darwin indicated that Homo sapiens was just another kind of animal, people were outraged.
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Even today, many refuse to believe it.
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Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart?
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Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals.
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They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.
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Whether sapiens are to blame or not, no sooner had they arrived at a new location than the native population became extinct.
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The last remains of Homo soloensis are dated to about 50,000 years ago.
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Homo denisover disappeared shortly thereafter.
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Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago.
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The last dwarf-like humans vanished from Flores Island about 12,000 years ago.
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They left behind some bones, stone tools, a few genes in our DNA, and a lot of unanswered questions.
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They also left behind us, Homo sapiens, the last human species.
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What was the sapiens' secret of success?
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How did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many distant and ecologically different habitats?
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How did we push all other human species into oblivion?
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Why couldn't even the strong, brainy, cold-proof Neanderthals survive our onslaught?
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The debate continues to rage.
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The most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible.
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Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language.
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for more audiobook samples and videos with your favorite authors.
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See you next time.
Что вы узнаете
Этот видеоклип поможет вам улучшить два ключевых навыка говорения: разбор сложных предложений (с длинными цепочками фактов о истории человечества) и выразительную интонацию при передаче научной информации. Также вы научитесь структурировать речь, как опытный рассказчик — чётко разделяя темы (физика, химия, биология) и подчёркивая важные моменты. И это отличная тренировка для тех, кто учит английский по видео: вы услышите, как носители говорят медленно, но уверенно, и сможете повторить за ними.
Слушайте за этими звуками
В аудио часто встречается связная речь: например, фраза "matter and energy started to coalesce" звучит как "matter 'n energy started t' coalesce" (сокращение "and" до "n" и "to" до "t'"). Также обратите внимание на редукцию в "about 13.5 billion years ago" — здесь "about" произносится как "abt" (без чёткого "о" в конце). Эти особенности помогут вам понять, как носители упрощают речь, и сделать ваше произношение более естественным. И помните: тренировки shadow speak именно на таких примерах делают речь живой и неповторимой.
Говорите, как носители
Чтобы повторять за рассказчиком, обратите внимание на ритм: он делит длинные абзацы на короткие фразы, например, "The story of these fundamental features / of our universe is called physics". Подчёркивайте ключевые слова: "Big Bang", "Cognitive Revolution", "Homo sapiens" — их ударение должно быть чётким. Также копируйте интонацию: она поднимается на вопросительных частях (даже если они не являются вопросами) и спадает на заключительных мыслях. Это то, что делает shadowing английский таким эффективным: вы не только повторяете слова, но и поглощаете стиль речи. И не забывайте: даже короткие тренировки shadowspeak каждый день принесут быстрые результаты!
Что такое техника Shadowing?
Shadowing — это научно обоснованная техника изучения языка, изначально разработанная для подготовки профессиональных переводчиков и популяризированная полиглотом доктором Александром Аргуэльесом. Метод прост, но эффективен: вы слушаете аудио на английском от носителей языка и немедленно повторяете вслух — как тень, следующая за говорящим с задержкой в 1–2 секунды. В отличие от пассивного прослушивания или грамматических упражнений, Shadowing заставляет мозг и мышцы рта одновременно обрабатывать и воспроизводить реальные речевые паттерны. Исследования показывают, что это значительно улучшает точность произношения, интонацию, ритм, связную речь, понимание на слух и беглость речи — что делает его одним из самых эффективных методов для подготовки к IELTS Speaking и реального общения на английском.