Monday, August 8, 2022

The Walk Out of Africa

 Our early ancestors use their five sensors and observation skills to the extreme for the sake of surviving the harsh conditions they are subjected to while living on this planet. They develop skill sets very early and this showed in the oldest cave painting discovered in France. The cave drawings in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, France is the oldest animal paintings on Earth. The red and black cave drawings contained in the cave are more than 30,000 years old, according to a radiocarbon dating study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.  The cave is located in Vallon-Pont d'Arc, Ardeche, and was classified as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site in 2014, 20 years after it was first discovered. The act and ability to draw what early humans saw in their environment is proof that shows they understood the idea of visual documentation of experiences which may help them to survive. This shows a very modern behavior of observation which gave rise to their acute understanding of phenology. The early humans developed this ability as a result of converting obstacles into power generators where they have to pass down all the knowledge of phenology that one generation developed to the next generation and the most suitable ways of recordings vital memories are through wall paintings. The challenges they faced made them more creative in developing all kinds of tools, agriculture techniques, animal husbandry, languages, writing skills as well as phenology. I believe that we the modern humans if were transported back in time to the stone Age with all our scientific knowledge, we can’t survive as our ancestors survived in facing the challenges they faced then. Our ancestors make the conscious decision to walk out of Africa on foot 150’000 years ago for the sake of survival and looking for better habitation. Scientists, Alex Timmerman and Tobias Fredric suggest the answer lies in climate change — not the human-caused variety, but rather change induced by 21,000-year-long wobbles in the Earth’s axis. Those wobbles mean that, from time to time, northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula would get a bit less sun and a bit more rainfall, creating greener and wetter landscapes. When our early ancestors observe the long-term difficulties, they will face if they remained in the same place hence that caused them to decide to move out of Africa for the sake of survival. According to Smithsonian Magazine dated July 2008, “in the 1980’s new tools completely change the kinds of questions that scientists could answer about the past. By analyzing DNA in living human populations, geneticists could trace lineages backward in time. These analyses have provided key support for the out of Africa theory. Homo sapiens, this new evidence has repeatedly shown, evolved in Africa, probably around 200’000 years ago. At that point in human history, which scientists have calculated to be about 200,000 years ago, a woman existed whose mitochondrial DNA was the source of the mitochondrial DNA in every person alive today. That is, all of us are her descendants. Scientists call her “Eve”.