Since When We Existed on this Earth?

 

Recently I wrote an essay on the Chinese Calender for Chinese New Year of the Dragon.

This afternoon on the third Day of the Chinese New Year, 2024 I thought I should pen a artiticle on: 

 How old are we since when we existed on this Earth? 

 By “we” I mean the group of animals zoologically called Homo sapiens that we proudly called ourselves as our present day modern human beings. The answer is probably we are twice as old as we once thought.

Let us recap in summary form what I wrote earlier. “Mya” below means “million years ago.”

 30 Mya: Old-world / new-world monkey split.

25 Mya: Old-world monkey / apes split. Also, Drosophila melanogaster / D.

obscura split

 15 Mya: Apes migrate to Asia.

6 -7 Mya: Sahelanthropus

 5 - 4 Mya: Common ancestors of chimps and humans. Formation of current

Galapagos Islands

History on the Emergence of human-like and humans:

3.6 Mya: Panama Isthmus rise / Lucy fossil / Australopithecus afarensis

footprints

 2.5 Mya: Tool use

1.8 Mya: Homo habilis out of Africa

1.6 Mya: Homo erectus in Asia

 600,000 years ago. Human / Neanderthal split.

500,000 years ago.  Homo erectus use fire

 355,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis footprints

200,000 years ago. Anatomically modern human

250,000 – 160,000 years ago. Homo sapiens arose.

120,000 years ago. Homo language possible

100,000 years ago. Wolf / dog split

79,000 – 15,000 years ago.  Start of Wisconsin glaciations

50,000 years ago. Humans migrate from Asia to Australia

 45,000 years ago. Megafauna extinction in Australia

30,000 years ago. Human migration from Asia to North America

14,000 – 10,000 years ago. Domestication of dog and Megafauna extinction in North America

12,000 years ago. Early agriculture

8,000 years ago. Domestication of cattle

6,000 years ago. Domestication of horse

3,000 years ago. Iron tools were found to be used by humans.

Let us now go back to 1856 to the west German valley of the Neander River called Neanderthal in German. Their labourers were clearing out a limestone cave when they came across some bones. News of this discovery came to the ears of a professor teaching at a college. He succeeded in getting to the site and recovered a set of about fourteen bones including a skull.

They were clearly human bones, but they showed some differences from those of modern humans. The bones had prominent bony ridges over the eyes. It also showed a backward sloping forehead, a receding chin, and very odd prominent teeth. He immediately classified the discovery as the “Neanderthal man” That caused an uproar among paleoanthropologists and biological anthropologists. They questioned if they were actually remains of some kind of ancient and primitive ancestors of modern human beings or was it the remains of modern humans with some kind of anatomical disorders?

Later, the same discoveries were also made of the same skulls and bones elsewhere in other parts of Europe, in the Middle East and Africa. It was obvious that it was not some kind of anatomical or bony disorder among humans everywhere. It became accepted that the Neanderthal man was indeed a somewhat primitive type of human creature that existed, probably even Adam and Eve were created in the same image as God. Paleoanthropologists promptly termed such beings as Homo neanderthalensis and gave modern human creatures as Homo sapiens, the term “sapiens” to mean “sapient” or “knowing” Unfortunately zoologists classified both as animals belonging to genus “Homo”.

Here are how scientists crudely classified us (Homo sapiens) as belonging to the Animal Kingdom as the descendants of the Homo genus:

• Kingdom - Animalia.
• Phylum - Chordata.
• Class - Mammalia.
• Order - Primates.
• Family - Hominidae.
• Genus - Homo.
• Species - Homo sapiens.

Nevertheless, eventually the difference between the Neanderthal man and modern human sapiens seemed so little that anthropologists and zoologists began to think of us as members of two subspecies. Neanderthal man may have originated from earlier and still more primitive ancestors as long as 3.6 million years ago (see list above).

As far as we know all these human-like species are also known as Hominins under a broader hominid, but not all hominids are hominins. Hominins (the tribe Hominini) are all modern and extinct humans and their immediate ancestors. Hominids (the genus Hominidae) are all hominins and great apes (including gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans), and all their immediate ancestors.

However, according to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, “human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioural traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.

One of the earliest defining human traits, bipedalism -- the ability to walk on two legs -- evolved over 4 million years ago. Other important human characteristics -- such as a large and complex brain, the ability to make and use tools, and the capacity for language -- developed more recently. Many advanced traits -- including complex symbolic expression, art, and elaborate cultural diversity -- emerged mainly during the past 100,000 years.

Humans are primates. Physical and genetic similarities show that the modern human species, Homo sapiens, has a very close relationship to another group of primate species, the apes. Humans and the great apes (large apes) of Africa -- chimpanzees (including bonobos, or so-called “pygmy chimpanzees”) and gorillas -- share a common ancestor that lived between 8 and 6 million years ago. Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa.

Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans. Scientists do not all agree, however, about how these species are related, or which ones simply died out. Many early human species -- certainly most of them – left no living descendants. Scientists also debate over how to identify and classify species of early humans, and about what factors influenced the evolution and extinction of each species.

Early humans first migrated out of Africa into Asia probably between 2 million and 1.8 million years ago. They entered Europe somewhat later, between 1.5 million and 1 million years. Species of modern humans populated many parts of the world much later. For instance, people first came to Australia probably within the past 60,000 years and to the Americas within the past 30,000 years or so. The beginnings of agriculture and the rise of the first civilizations occurred within the past 12,000 years”.

According to another source, “the immediate ancestors of humans were members of the genus Australopithecus.  The australopithecines (or australopiths) were intermediate between apes and people.  Both australopithecines and humans are biologically similar enough to be classified as members of the same biological tribe--the Hominini.  All people, past and present, along with the australopithecines are hominins.  We share not only the fact that we evolved from the same ape ancestors in Africa but that both genera are habitually bipedal, or two-footed, upright walkers.  By comparison, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas are primarily quadrupedal, or four-footed. 

Over the last decade, there have been several important fossil discoveries in Africa of what may be very early transitional ape/hominins, or proto hominins.  These creatures lived just after the divergence from our common hominid ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, during the late Miocene and early Pliocene Epochs.  The fossils have been tentatively classified as members of three distinct genera--Sahelanthropus, Orrorin , and Ardipithecus .  Sahelanthropus was the earliest, dating 7-6 million years ago.  Orrorin lived about 6 million years ago, while Ardipithecus remains have been dated to 5.8-4.4 million years ago.  At present, the vote is still out as to whether any of these three primates were in fact true hominins and if they were our ancestors.  The classification of Sahelanthropus has been the most in question.

The earliest australopithecines very likely did not evolve until 5 million years ago or shortly thereafter (during the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch) in East Africa.  The primate fossil record for this crucial transitional period leading to australopithecines is still scanty and somewhat confusing.  However, by about 4.2 million years ago, unquestionable australopithecines were present.  By 3 million years ago, they were common in both East and South Africa.  Some have been found dating to this period in North Central Africa also.  As the australopithecines evolved, they exploited more types of environments.  Their early proto-hominin ancestors had been predominantly tropical forest animals.  However, African forests were progressively giving way to sparse woodlands and dry grasslands, or savannas.  The australopithecines took advantage of these new conditions.  In the more open environments, bipedalism would very likely have been an advantage.

By 2.5 million years ago, there were at least 2 evolutionary lines of hominins descended from the early australopithecines.  One line apparently was adapted primarily to the food resources in lake margin grassland environments and had an omnivorous diet that increasingly included meat.  Among them were our early human ancestors who started to make stone tools by this time.  The other line seems to have lived more in mixed grassland and woodland environments, like the earlier australopithecines, and was primarily vegetarian.  This second, more conservative line of early hominids died out by 1 million years ago or shortly before then.  It is likely that all the early hominins, including humans, supplemented their diets with protein and fat rich termites and ants just as some chimpanzees do today”.

Let us not go too far back into the timeline into the evolution of humans on Earth for which we are still uncertain. Let us remain to the time of the first discovery on the Neanderthals that underwent milder evolutionary changes where at some time and some places were similar to us although their fossils were fewer for us to study how they descended and exited from other hominins.  

But we know their old skeletons are almost similar to ours and by judging from them modern humans must have developed around 40,000 years ago which I estimate was the time when Adam and Eve were created in the same image as God at least 500,000 years ago. All other hominids may have been destroyed by God long before God recreated a new model resembling His likeness as Adam and Eve.

See my other write up on

“Creation or Evolution? The Bible vs. Science” here:

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/2022/07/creation-or-evolution-bible-vs-science.html

Judging from my point of view, Adam and Eve may have been created in northern Africa after their descendants started to migrate eastwards out of Africa after being chased out of the Garden of Eden, though I am uncertain.

The latest Neanderthal skeletons are about 35,000 years old suggesting some of them may still exist after modern Adam and Eve were created or evolved. This means modern man and the Neanderthal man were both on Earth together for some time till God decided to get rid of “children of gods” in the Great Flood during Noah’s time during the last great glaciation some 20,000 years ago. This may suggest that the Neanderthals and the modern Homo sapiens lived together for only about five thousand years before the Neanderthals species were wiped out from the surface of this Earth.

Presumably, when the two subspecies encountered each other they compete with food and habitats, and according to what I understand on the evolution of life on Earth, the Neanderthals lost out as one of the biological laws on the “Survival of the Fittest” "Survival of the fittest” was a phrase used by Herbert Spencer that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection.

Herbert Spencer first used this phrase, after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in his Principles of Biology (1864), in which he drew parallels between his own economic theories and Darwin's biological ones.

One reason for the demise of the Neanderthals was we believe the Neanderthals were stockier, stronger and heavier than the modern humans at that time, but less agile than its human animal counterparts besides the moderns were brainier and more intelligent, and more ingenious and creative. Their modern counterparts may have been able to invent weapons such as slings, bows and arrows that were able to attack the Neanderthals from a distance instead of a close encounter with the Neanderthals who were stronger. Eventually the Neanderthals may have lost every battle and diminished in numbers until the modern Homo sapiens began to rule over this Earth.

But there is a problem here. A published report in February 1988 by a team of French and Israeli anthropologists raises questions about early human creatures’ relationship to the Neanderthals. Their findings in an Israel cave of skeletal remains of some thirty human beings that seems to be Homo sapiens sapiens. Stone tools found with these remains were examined for age using an analytical procedure called “thermoluminescence” that in simple language means “production of light on heating” that the skeletons were 90.000 years old.

If this was correct, this would imply that modern human creatures split off from the neanderthal creatures more than twice as long as was previously thought, and this means that much more time for the development of differences that did not show up in the fossil bones. We may conclude that the Neanderthal creatures and the modern man arose differently as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as I would strongly believe and accept some 500,000 years ago. In other words, we are entirely different animal species than those creatures, the Neanderthals.

If the Neanderthals and humans coexisted not for 5,000 years but for 500,000 years then why should we, human creatures, take so long to wipe out the Neanderthals until God decides to wipe out all the “children of various gods” in the Noah Great Flood. This would suggest to me, on the contrary, the Neanderthals were smarter than we thought. They would have put up a better fight than human creatures during those times.

I think we, as scientists along with other biological evolutionists, and paleoanthropologists need to tackle this question on hominid origin on Earth. But it is a sad thought that we ourselves may no longer exist within the next 350 years at most from the way we produce, consume, congest, and pollute to give way to the humbler creatures that do not require these, yet they thrive abundantly.  It shall be these humbler and meeker creatures that shall once again regain and inherit this Earth.

It shall be programmed in them through the handiwork of her Creator who shall regain her original glory once again.

Read this biological reality in Matthew 5:5:

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” where the lower and meeker life like bacteria, plants, and other organisms that were the first to appear on Earth and human creatures the last to surface, but we shall also be the first to be wiped out from this Earth.

The explanation is here:

Humanity left in Isolation or Destroyed?

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/2023/12/humanity-in-isolation.html
 

lim ju boo

 (An 2,469 essay)