Paleoanthropologist Answers Caveman Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm paleoanthropologist Steve Churchill.

Let's answer some questions from the internet.

This is Caveman Support.

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@Seanspain asks, how did caveman hunt with clubs?

Animals are really fast.

We often think of caveman as having clubs.

They probably used clubs.

But we know that by the time humans were moving

into Ice Age Europe, that they had really long spears

like six or seven feet tall.

And we know sometimes they were tipping those spears

with stone like this to make lethal, sharp stabbing spears.

Early modern humans had real long range projectile weaponry

like bow and arrow, and in some places spear throwers.

The spear has a nock on the other end

which fits into that hook.

And so the spear would just be held parallel

to the spear thrower,

and then when you throw it, it allows you

to propel the spear over a distance of about 40 meters

or about 120 feet.

@KarenRyden asks, I did 23 and Me.

I had 89% of the Neanderthal variant of all in their system.

What does that mean?

You have more Neanderthal genes than 89%

of the people who've submitted their DNA.

Now, most of us only have a small proportion

of Neanderthal genes, only about 1% to 4%.

Early members of our species migrated out of Africa,

they met and sometimes interbred with the Neanderthals.

So if you have any ancestry from Europe

or from Asia, you probably have got some Neanderthal genes.

We have complete genomes of several Neanderthals.

We're able to know, for instance,

that some Neanderthals had red hair.

So you might think,

hey, if I have red hair, maybe I got that from Neanderthals.

But it actually turns out that it is a different gene

that causes the red hair in Neanderthals.

So not all redheads are descended from Neanderthals,

but because most redheads are European,

most redheads have got some Neanderthal genes in them.

At @Slugapotamus asks,

you think Ice Age is historically accurate?

Well, it actually is pretty, pretty accurate.

You see in this clip here,

some animals moving past these gigantic thick ice sheets.

Most of the animals that are depicted in Ice Age,

giant ground sloths, wooly mammoths, saber toothed cats,

were actually around here in North America.

In places, the ice sheets

were as much as two and a half miles thick.

And I love the way that they depict the barren land

and just dirt around the glaciers.

When you have ice sheets like that,

you get deserts forming right up against them

because the ice sheets suck all the moisture

out of the atmosphere and create snow over the ice sheets.

I think that the humans that they depict

are also pretty accurate.

They're shown wearing tailored clothing.

We find bone needles in the archeological record

beginning about 30,000 years ago.

And that indicates people were able

to stitch together clothing.

But there are a couple things that are inaccurate.

You wouldn't see animals up near the ice sheets.

Animals live where the plants grow.

And the other thing is there are no saber toothed squirrels

in the fossil record.

@Andydoodle56 asks, okay paleoanthropology nerds,

what species is the Geico caveman anyway?

Well, let's see.

Looking at the brow ridge morphology and the really big nose

and the facial architecture,

it looks a lot like a Neanderthal.

@StresthaAlishna asks, what happened to Neanderthals?

Well, frankly, I think we did 'em in.

Modern humans moved into their territory, out competed them

and out reproduced them.

They were short and stocky and very muscular.

They also had short limbs, short arms and short legs,

so that reduced the surface area by which they lost heat.

And they had kind of a strange architecture of the nose

and face, which also helped them deal

with cold air that they were breathing.

Those bodies were really good at producing heat,

but that's not good for conserving energy.

They had very costly bodies.

They were costly to move, costly to feed,

costly to keep warm.

And so they didn't have a lot of room left over

in their energy budgets to devote to reproducing.

They had a lot of competition in the form

of large, fierce carnivores.

Things like cave lions, cave hyenas, saber toothed cats,

wolves, grizzly bears.

And so probably for much of their history in Europe,

Neanderthals were just hanging on by a thread.

@roxynotlalonde asks, hey, where did early humans live?

If you look at the earliest stages of human evolution,

the first four million years is entirely here in Africa

where we've got little ape men, the Australopiths.

We find them here in the rift valley in east Africa,

in countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia,

and we find them in southern Africa

in cave systems outside of Johannesburg.

By about two and a half million years,

members of our own genus like Homo habilis start to crop up.

And that includes Homo erectus.

And Homo erectus is the first one to actually leave Africa.

We pick up Homo erectus initially in the Republic of Georgia

and then eventually in Indonesia.

And you might wonder, how did Homo erectus get to Indonesia?

Those are islands out there.

Keep in mind this is during the ice ages,

and during glacial intervals, sea levels drop.

And in places where there's a shallow sea,

the sea floor becomes exposed.

And Indonesia just becomes a peninsula

connected to the southern part of Asia.

And so Homo erectus could walk out to those islands.

Meanwhile, a new species emerges.

It comes out of Homo erectus.

Most of us would call it Homo heidelbergensis.

It looks like this guy right here.

Very Homo erectus looking

with big brow ridges and massive face.

These guys up here in Europe gives rise to the Neanderthals.

And in Africa, they evolve into our own species,

Homo sapiens, about 300,000 years ago.

And by about 70,000 years ago, they started expanding

out of Africa.

And they probably encountered populations of Homo erectus,

which they knocked off.

And by 40,000 years ago, they are moving into Europe

and starting to encounter the Neanderthals

who they knock off.

And by about 20,000 years,

they're all the way up here in eastern Siberia

and they crossed the Bering Land Bridge

where they become the Native Americans that we know today.

@realityseeker asks, did cavemen have a sense of humor?

They probably did have a sense of humor.

This is a depiction of an Ibex,

which is a kind of a wild goat.

You know, you can see its head here

and its body and its legs.

And it's got something coming out of its rear end here,

which maybe is the first poop joke.

@iamrwkali asks, how did humans survive the ice age?

Gosh, I can hardly bear to be outside

for more than five minutes when the temperature drops

below zero degrees Celsius.

Neanderthals had fire, sure,

but these early modern humans in Europe

probably had better pyrotechnology,

hearths which channeled the airflow

so they could really stoke the fire.

When the ice ages really ramped up, they stayed put

and they just hunkered down and dealt with it.

@ahastyretweet asks,

you know how they discovered those fossils

of three feet tall early humans in Indonesia?

They called them hobbits as a nickname,

which is really cool,

but they really missed an opportunity

to call them Neandershorts.

I'm totally gonna steal that one

because that's at the intersection of dad jokes

and paleoanthropology.

The hobbits are a species of early human,

and they come from a little island in Indonesia

called Flores Island.

So the species is called Homo floresiensis.

These guys are the descendants of Homo erectus.

Homo erectus got out onto Flores Island, got trapped there.

When you get trapped on an island,

if you are a small bodied mammal

like a small rodent or something, you tend to get larger.

If you're a larger bodied mammal, you tend to get smaller,

which is called island dwarfism.

And so these little hobbits find themselves

living in a backdrop of giant rats

and tiny dwarf elephants called stegodon

and being hunted by things like Komodo dragons.

@Caleblama asks, honest question, did cavemen have pets?

The only domesticated animal that we had

during the stone age is the dog.

The earliest undisputed dogs in the fossil record

come from a site in Germany called Bonn-Oberkassel

where there is a human buried with a dog.

They're used to help with hunting,

they're used to help fend off carnivores.

We don't start to see things like cattle

or goats until humans settle down

and start engaging in agriculture

after about 10,000 years ago.

@WrldOfPaleoAnth asks,

how did the A. afarensis specimen dubbed Lucy get her name?

Lucy is a 3.2 million year old partial skeleton

from Ethiopia

that represents the species Australopithecus afarensis,

and she's one of the most famous fossils out there.

She was found in 1974.

The team that found her was playing the Beatles song

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds incessantly in camp,

and they named Lucy in honor of that song.

@fifokaswiti asks, things I'm too tired to Google.

When did hominins start having hair

that grows indefinitely long?

In a quadruped,

most of the sunshine is falling on their back

and the hair protects their skin.

They don't have as much hair on the belly

because it's shady down there.

For a biped, most of the solar radiation is falling

on the top of the head

and the shoulders and the upper part of the back.

So Homo erectus probably retained hair

on the top of the head to block out solar radiation

and evolved the capacity to grow it longer

to protect the head, shoulders,

and the upper part of the back from sunburn.

@bzieg73 asks,

so like, what did cavemen do about dental hygiene?

Well, unfortunately, probably not much.

We do have some fossils

which denote habitual use of toothpicks,

where they've used toothpicks so much

that they've actually created little grooves in their teeth.

But before that, we've got guys like this guy from Africa.

He's about 250,000 years old.

He's a representative of Homo heidelbergensis.

And he's got absolutely rotten teeth with huge cavities,

probably because he was eating a lot of honey.

He's got a hole in the side of his head here,

which is probably from an infection

from bacteria entering the bloodstream from these cavities

and circulating around

and setting up an infection in the side of his skull.

And this is probably what killed him.

@TwinZ25464257 asks, what's your favorite ancient hominid,

my paleoanthropology friends?

Oh, that's like asking me to pick my favorite child.

I will say that these guys are one of my favorites,

a 250,000 year old species called Homo naledi.

I was a member of a team

that found them in caves in South Africa,

down a chute which is about 40 feet long

and gets down to about seven inches wide.

Way too small for me to get in there.

We actually needed an entire crew of small bodied excavators

to get down into this chamber.

They have an ape sized brain.

They have very primitive morphology in the face.

They're probably one of the most primitive members

of our genus, but very late in time.

They're a relic species that just hung on

without changing very much through time

until we find them in the caves of South Africa.

@Blueslicker asks, what is the missing link

between ape and man?

Well, as a paleoanthropologist, I gotta tell you,

we hate the term missing link.

And that kind of thinking leads to conceptions

of a march of progress

where evolution is just a stepwise series

of progressive changes through time.

But the human family tree was very, very bushy.

There were lots of species.

We recognize anywhere from 28 to 30 of them.

At roughly six million years ago,

our lineage began to diverge from the lineage

that leads to living chimpanzees and bonobos.

Our earliest ancestors would look like a chimpanzee,

like this chimp skull here.

They had very snouty faces like a chimpanzee.

But you'd be impressed by the fact

that they're walking on two legs

and that their canine teeth,

this big fang here, was actually a little bit smaller.

But other than that, they're very chimpanzee-like.

@ShrubPlays asks, if Gigantopithecus existed,

why can't Bigfoot?

Why not indeed.

Gigantopithecus was a huge ape.

If it was standing on its hind legs,

it was probably about eight feet tall,

maybe twice the size of a gorilla

with a huge head and huge teeth.

They probably lived on bamboo like panda bears.

And they lived in Asia

up until about a half million years ago.

And some people have thought

that maybe the Yeti in the Himalayas

or Bigfoot in North America are just relic populations

of Gigantopithecus.

That would require that Gigantopithecus

crossed the Bering Sea into North America

without leaving any kind of fossil record.

But maybe that happened.

@PATRIC_SUN asks, bro, when did language start?

If we look at Neanderthals,

they have brains which were every bit as big as ours,

and they seem to have the neural structures

that one would need to produce language.

We can tell from holes for nerves in the base of the skull

that they had very good motor control of their tongues.

Neanderthals had a very long, low brain case

and a more projecting face.

And that results in a flatter base of the skull.

So Neanderthals probably could only produce

one or two vowel sounds.

In our species, Homo sapiens,

our face is tucked up more under the brain case

and we have a more globular cranial vault,

and that creates a bend in the base of the brain case.

We have flexion here.

This flexion gives us a resonating space that allows us

to make the full range of vowel sounds.

Keep in mind that even monkeys

and apes use verbal communication.

There are things like pant-hoots in chimpanzees

which mean something to their group members.

At @7lightbringers asks,

what the [beep] did cavemen do for fun?

Well, probably not a [beep] lot to tell you the truth.

We know in the later part of the Paleolithic

or the Stone Age

that they're making some musical instruments

because we've recovered flutes made out of bird bones.

People don't start painting on cave walls

until modern humans are in Europe

towards the end of the ice age.

What's really cool about these cave paintings is they often

tend to make use of features

and relief in the walls of the cave,

such that if you had a fire going

in the chamber of the cave,

the flickering of the fire would make these animals

look like they're moving.

These Paleolithic artists were using a lot

of different pigments.

Sometimes it's ground ochre, which is an iron oxide,

sometimes it's manganese.

Maybe they're crushing up plant material like berries.

And a lot of times we get hand prints

where they put their hand against the cave wall.

And then probably by chewing up some manganese or some ochre

and spitting it, they're creating like a spray paint pattern

around their hand.

@vichalhey asks, what makes humans unique?

Creativity, moral consciousness,

ability to reason and rationality, self-awareness?

What's really unique about humans is the extremes

to which we carry these things,

the extremes to which we become dependent on technology

and language and social connections.

We know from the archeological and fossil record in Europe

that Neanderthals lived in very small social groups.

They may have only known 40 or 50 other Neanderthals.

Early modern humans seem to have extended social networks.

They seemed to be trading things over long distances.

And so early modern humans in Europe probably knew hundreds

of other early modern humans.

@vnusruledx asks,

the one history question I want answered at this point is

what is the freaking purpose behind the Venus figurines?

Well, Venus figurines like this Venus of Willendorf

that you see here, some people have thought

that they're fertility figurines.

But the truth is not all of them are females.

Most of them are not even human figurines.

And probably what these things are are trade items.

As people go visiting other groups,

they're carrying them along to give as gifts.

@McNidas asks, quick question,

what did cavemen do if there were no caves in their area?

If they happen to live in an area with no caves,

they just made do with open air shelters.

Primitive tents from sticks and animal skins

and use animal skins for bedding.

It's ironic that we call them cavemen

because first off, they were usually living

in rock shelters, not an actual cave.

And when we do find them in caves,

they were always just living in the mouth of the cave.

@CFA_Yin asks, so what did humans eat

before the discovery of fire?

Our ancestors were still eating a lot of vegetable material,

and that meant they needed big guts

because you gotta have a big gut to break down

that high fibrous diet.

By the time Homo erectus came along,

they're starting to cook stuff,

they're starting to mash food probably with stone tools.

This is a hand ax,

about 1.7 to 1.5 million years old from Africa.

This is probably a large scale butchery tool.

And the great thing about fire is that it allows us

to break down the food before we ingest it

and we can actually get a whole lot more of the calories

and nutrients out of it.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thank you for watching Caveman Support.

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