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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 21 Jul 2022

Taken: 21 Jul 2022

1 favorite     2 comments    39 visits

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Image and excerpt •
How Language Began •
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Daniel Everett •

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Figure 5

Figure 5
Homo erectus (artist's impression)
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The greatest hunter. The greatest communicator. The most intrepid travellers. Perhaps the greatest distance runner on earth, ‘Homo erectus’ was the unsurpased marvel of its time. No other creature has ever contrasted more starkly with all the animals that had ever lived. ‘Neanderthalensis’ and ‘sapiens’ were born from and first lived in the shadow of ‘erectus’. We were not new. They were. Sapiens are just the improved model of Homo. Erectus was the first to journey they were the original imagination-motivated travellers.

. . . . So early did Homo begin to travel that, although they originated in Africa, their first fossils were found not there but in Asia -- in Indonesia and China. Leter, the fossils of other Homi were discovered in Europe -- in Spain, France and Germany. How did these fossils come to be in these places. It seems like a nearly impossible task for humans to actually walk around the world. But they did. And for Homo, with it nearly unprecedented endurance, the trip wasn’t as hard as it sound.

Initially erectus and other Homo species were hunters and gatherers. As such, they needed to move frequently as they exhausted the edible flora and fauna of a given reason in a relatively short period fo time. Hunter-gatherers usually move a bit further each day from their original village. They may sometime return to an established camp, but as food becomes ever scarcer in the area surrounding the original village, hunter-gatherers move to establish new settlements closer to their fresher sources of proteins and plant foods.

The average forager travels just over nine miles per day. Assume that they move communities around four times per year and that each new village is a day’s foraging from the last village. That is thirty seven miles per year. How long, at that rate would it take an erectus community to travel from Africa to Beijing or Indonesia, both locations where erectus fossils were found? Well, if one divides 10,000 kilometers (roughly the distance from East Africa to where erectus fossils have been found in China) only sixty (the number of kilometers erects would, under my extremely conservative calculation, move in a year), then it would take only 167 years for erectus to travel Eurasia, moving at a normal pace.. . . . .

In the course of their earliest journeys, erectus populations would never have encountered any other humans. They were the first to arrive at every destination. They had all the natural resources fo the world before them, with all the land they saw at their disposal. Homo erectus men and women were the greatest and most fearless pioneers of our species. ~ Page 48/49
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
HOW LANGUAGE BEGAN
2 years ago.

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