Nicholas Wade

A Look at Recent Human Evolution

Before the Dawn reconstructs human pre-history, from the time that modern humans left the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago to the beginning of recorded history some 5,000 years ago.

For most of this period people lived as they always had done, as hunters and gatherers. Only 15,000 years ago did people first begin to form settled communities, preparing the way for the great civilizations of the Near East that emerged around 3,000 BC.

Hunters and gatherers make little of permanence and leave little trace of their presence. The pages of history for most of the period from 50,000 years ago might seem irredeemably blank.

But the human genome provides a new and unexpected window on the deep human past. By analyzing the DNA of living people around the world, geneticists can trace the routes people took as they migrated from Africa and colonized the rest of the habitable world.

Geneticists can also identify many of the genetic changes that occurred as people on different continents adapted to the local climate, diseases and prevailing social constraints.

Historical linguists, after a long period of despair, are beginning to reconstruct the tree of languages that sprang from the tongue of the ancestral human population.

These two new lines of inquiry, when combined with what archaeologists can recover of past cultures, have provided a more thorough view of the human past than has ever seemed possible.

Before the Dawn recounts how the first modern humans broke out from Africa, where the fearsome Neanderthals had long penned them in. One small band, probably 150 people in all, escaped and populated the rest of the world. Their first landfall was India. Thence they appeared in Europe and slowly wrested the continent away from the Neanderthals, driving them to extinction. But the modern humans in Europe were then thrown back by an even more formidable adversary – the return of the glaciers. Except for southern refuges in Spain, Italy and the Ukraine, all of Europe became uninhabitable. Only after the glaciers began their final retreat, and new forms of sociality had emerged, were people able to settle down in fixed communities and begin the long march toward civilization.

Modern humans continued to evolve throughout the period. Before the Dawn is the first integrated history of the last 50,000 years

Excerpt:

Travel back into the human past, and the historical evidence is plentiful enough for the first couple of hundred years, then rapidly diminishes. At the 5,000 year mark written records disappear altogether, yielding to the wordless witness of archaeological sites. Going further back, even these become increasingly rare over the next 10,000 years, fading almost to nothing by 15,000 years ago, the date of the first human settlements. Before that time, people lived a nomadic existence based on hunting and gathering. They built nothing and left behind almost nothing of permanence, save a few stone tools and the remarkable painted caves of Europe.

Travel on back for another 35,000 years and you will have reached the 50,000 year mark, the time when the ancestral human population was still confined to its homeland somewhere in northeast Africa but had begun to show the first signs of modern behavior. If this is the point at which the modern human story begins, then written records exist for just the last 10% of it; 90% of human history seems irretrievably lost.

Keep traveling back in time to the earliest starting point in the human narrative, the period 5 million years ago when the ape-like creatures at the head of the human line of descent split from those at the head of the chimpanzee line of descent. The only physical evidence from throughout this period, which saw the evolution from ape to human form, is a handful of battered skulls and a few stone tools.

No deep understanding, it might seem, could ever be gained of these two vanished periods, the 5 million years of human evolution and the 50,000 years of prehistory. But in the past few years an extraordinary new archive has become available to those who study human evolution, human nature and history. It is the record encoded in the DNA of the human genome, and in the versions of it carried by the world’s population. Geneticists have long contributed to the study of the human past but are doing so with particular success since the full sequence of DNA units in the genome was determined in 2003.

Why should the human genome, specifically shaped for survival in the present, have so much to say about the past? As the repository of hereditary information that is in constant flux, the genome is like a document under ceaseless revision. Its mechanism of change is such that it retains evidence about its previous drafts and these, though not easy to interpret, provide a complete record that stretches back millions of years. The genome can therefore be interrogated at many different time levels. It can supply answers that reach back more than 50,000 years to the genetic Adam, a man whose Y chromosome is carried by all men now alive. Or it can be queried about the events of a mere couple of centuries ago, such as whether Thomas Jefferson had a secret family with his slave mistress Sally Hemings.

From Adam to Jefferson, the genome is helping researchers create a new and far more detailed picture of human evolution, human nature and history. From the great darkness, a surprisingly full narrative is emerging…

This book describes those aspects of human evolution, nature, and pre-history that have been illumined by genetic discoveries of the last few years.

Readers who do not follow these fields closely may be surprised at the richness of the information in the new narrative. There exists no video of how apes slowly morphed into people, but a sequence of the salient events can for the most part be reconstructed. There is no map that records the dispersal of the new humans from their ancestral homeland, but researchers can now follow the path they took out of Africa and their migrations through the world outside. It’s even possible to reconstruct some of the social institutions that emerged as people made the transition from a nomadic way of life, based on hunting and gathering, to today’s complex societies.

Information from the genome has helped tell paleoanthropologists when humans lost their body hair and when they gained the power of speech. It has clarified for archaeologists their long quandary as to whether Neanderthals and modern humans peacefully interbred with each other or fought until the Neanderthals’ extinction. It has furnished anthropology with information about human adaptation to cultural practices like cattle-herding and cannibalism. The cascade of DNA data is even benefiting historical linguistics, though indirectly, as biologists apply the tree-building methods developed for gene genealogies to reconstructing the evolution of language.

On the critical question of the ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, the last group from which everyone alive today is descended, the techniques of paleoanthropology and archaeology are powerless to say anything about a people that has vanished without trace. But geneticists, by rummaging around in the genome’s rich attic, can fill in all kinds of unexpected detail. They can estimate how large the ancestral population was. They can say where in Africa it probably lived. They can put a date, though a rough one, on when language emerged. They can even infer, in one instance, what the first language sounded like.