Homo

Or you go back 15 million years, and the Old World monkeys are going this way, and the Homenidae are going that way.

Or you go back seven million years, and the chimpanzees go that way, and Homo goes off in this other direction.

Basically, if you're looking at it as an evolutionary biologist, okay, some chunk of DNA went one way and some chunk of DNA went the other, down this branch, and they both managed to make it to this point, but you can't really derive any kind of morality about who has the right to dominate and who has the right to take over the resources of the world from that.

It's just a neutral pattern.

The evolutionary or purely scientific point of view would be that there is no value in nature.

So whether the planet's dead or alive actually doesn't make any difference.

If we then place a human value on diversity for cultural reasons, as we saw with the Gibbons, or in our own culture, every one of you is probably sitting in this class because you had a nice experience with some kind of biodiversity at some Well basically what that does is we are placing a human value on something, and we've won the battle, and now our value system, which is our own Homo sapiens value system of one kind or another, and you've seen there are bunches of them, is being placed on the rest of the planet.

So some people spend to exploit the planet, some people spend to conserve it.

It's a shame that most people take these drawings and the stories they tell as fact, even when they contradict the actual evidence.

Take the drawings of Homo erectus, which often appear as intellectually inferior and far from human.

But the fossil evidence paints a different picture.

Below the neck, Homo erectus is almost identical to modern humans.

And even its brain size is within the range of modern human beings.

Homo erectus also used stone tools.

They harnessed fire.

And in fact, there's even some paleoanthropologists who believe that Homo erectus was capable of building boats.

I am pathologically curious.

So over my career, I've been intrigued by many different questions that took me from what we're talking today, right? The evolution of the genus Homo.

all the way to formation of caves in Brazil or the morphology of bats' wings.

So yeah, we've been doing a lot of things together.

So it's very refreshing to be talking to you today about evolution and having your sunshiny disposition and like you're like, let's all collaborate attitude about it.

We are going to talk specifically about an article of yours that just came out in Nature Communications.

It is called Evolutionary Drivers of Encephalization and Facial Reduction in the Genus Homo.

I think that we should start by just breaking down the title.

This episode is supported by 23andMe.

It's fun to think about humanity settling the galaxy, outposts of familiar Homo sapiens spread among the stars.

But there may be nothing at all familiar about these distant future spacefarers.

Human populations on other planets may quickly evolve into things that look nothing like humans as we know them.

But if those challenges are met, we may reach a time when many generations of humans have lived and died on the red planet.

Those people will be very different to us.

How will they change? Will Martian humans or human Martians actually evolve? Will they eventually become a species distinct from Homo sapiens? Humans have never stopped evolving.

Whenever a human population is isolated, characteristic genotypes develop.

Subaru.

Anyway, earliest fossil evidence of the genus Homo, the group that included modern humans, 2.8 million years ago.

And that's four or five-ish million years since the earliest known human ancestors separated from the evolutionary lineage leading to modern chimpanzees.

And that's 2 million roughly years when early human relatives started to walk upright.

1.9 million years ago, Homo erectus appeared, eventually spreading beyond Africa.

300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, modern humans, first appeared in Africa.

Only 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, major migrations of modern humans out of Africa into Asia, Europe, and beyond disappeared.

12,000 years ago, agriculture began developing in several regions, eventually leading to permanent settlements and civilizations.

Essentially, the first thought that I would have is just...

Something that, like, you know, if you go into the history of the human species and things like that and elements along the lines of, you know, let's say we're talking about the, you know, the Homo sapien related ancestors, but that were not actually Homo sapiens, like Homo halibus and things like that, things that were very similar to our species, but slightly different.

of a similar like playing field skill level to some extent you could have that like element of okay they are like you know they are more of a threat in some instances than perhaps a lion or a wolf or things like that but i want to hear your reasoning

all right so you're you just said one theory the other theory is that i the uncanny valley applies to things that are pale shallow eyed pale skinned um gaunt because we are naturally inclined to avoid sick people and corpses Uh, I don't like this one because human beings for the past, oh God, thousands of years had been known to care for the dead and also to care for the sick.