5 Misconceptions About Early Humans

Scientists and historians have long debated what makes us human. Why is our species, Homo sapiens, so different compared to our extinct cousins? Anthropologists point to our physiological adaptations that allowed our species to survive when others died out. OK, sure, but what about our cultural advancements that include everything from cave paintings to Taylor Swift?

Let’s dig deep into a few misconceptions about early humans, from their supposed stupidity to their alleged cohabitation with dinosaurs, adapted from an episode of Misconceptions on YouTube.

Misconception: Modern humans invented culture.

For a long time, the existing fossil evidence seemed to show that Homo sapiens demonstrated “modern” behaviors beginning in the Upper Paleolithic, also known as the late Stone Age, roughly 45,000 years ago. These behaviors included making and using a variety of sophisticated stone tools, living in semi-permanent settlements, fashioning personal ornaments, creating rituals, hunting a variety of small prey, and carving figurines and musical instruments. Some fossils from the period showed Homo sapiens had even cared for injured individuals and purposefully buried their dead.

In contrast, earlier Homo sapiens, who had emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, were believed to be too primitive to demonstrate any kind of intellectual culture. These so-called “archaic Homo sapiens” supposedly lacked the brain power to develop more complex communities and adapt to environmental conditions. Archaeologists hypothesized that there must have been a sudden burst of cultural development in late Stone Age Europe that allowed Homo sapiens to evolve into recognizably modern humans. There’s even a name for this theory: The Paleolithic Revolution hypothesis. 

But today, thanks to genetics and archaeological discoveries, this Euro-centric narrative is falling out of fashion as we understand more about the rich lives of early humans.

There have been several discoveries over the past couple of decades showing that pre-Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens used tools and made art in places other than Europe. Here are just a few examples. In present-day Morocco, scientists have found 300,000-year-old Homo sapiens fossils, which in and of itself was a pretty awesome find. But with these incredibly ancient ancestors were finely flaked stone points and blades attached to handles, a step up in sophistication from the chunky stone tools of earlier generations. Objects of similar skill and age were found in southern Kenya, revealing a leap forward in technology in the Middle Paleolithic.

Homo sapiens fossils dated to about 190,000 years ago were found in an Israeli cave along with handaxes and plant material may have been used as a sleeping mat. A 73,000-year-old marking made of red ochre pigment on a rock, discovered in South Africa, might be the oldest known symbolic art, though we don’t know what the symbol means. A cave painting of a warty pig found in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and dated to at least 51,000 years ago might be the oldest known figurative art. All of these examples predate the Upper Paleolithic and its better-known artifacts, such as the cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet in France.

And this is just our species. There’s evidence to suggest that Neanderthals also demonstrated modern cultural behavior, such as making musical instruments, wearing jewelry, and burying their dead. But we’ll leave that for “Misconceptions About Neanderthals.”

Misconception: Human evolution is linear and progressive.

You’ve probably seen an image like this floating around. It’s based on “The Road to Homo Sapiens,” better known as “The March of Progress,” which appeared in the 1965 volume Early Man in the Life Nature Library series from Time-Life Books. 

Anthropologists have made amazing advances since “The March of Progress” was published, including the discoveries of hominin species like Australopithecus afarensis, a.k.a. Lucy’s species, in 1974; Homo floresiensis, a.k.a. the Hobbit, in 2003; and Homo naledi, who doesn’t have a nickname, in 2013. Scientists have also learned much, much more about human origins from the study of ancient DNA, as well as archaeological discoveries that have transformed our understanding of prehistoric cultures. Whether these discoveries involve Brendan Fraser is yet to be revealed to the public.

But it’s not just that “The March of Progress” is outdated. It’s often used to illustrate an evolutionary concept that’s wrong.

It seems to suggest that evolution is progressive, meaning that a species evolves toward a state of perfection. In other words, a primitive species will constantly better itself through evolution to reach the ideal state of existence within its environment—which, in the image, is a bearded, confident, and physically fit human dude. It’s a worldview that was very prominent before Darwin, heavily damaged by Darwinian evolution, and—despite some attempts at revamping the core ideas—largely died out among serious Western scientists by the 1940s.

Legendary anthropologist F. Clark Howell, then a professor at the University of Chicago, wrote the Early Man book in which the “The Road to Homo Sapiens” appeared. It was illustrated by Rudolph Zallinger, the artist in residence at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. Does it really make sense for these two to push a long-discredited evolutionary theory?

No. Because they didn’t. At least not deliberately. 

The full image in the book was a foldout of 15 different creatures, but when folded in the book, you see only the six of meme fame. That’s fine—it just adds more steps. The real problem comes with the fact that Howell and Zellinger never intended for the illustration to be a linear sequence.

Its introduction calls it “milestones of primate and human evolution.” And some of the captions for the drawings say things like “its teeth and pelvis led scientists to wonder [if] it could be ancestral to man, but it is now better known, and was clearly an aberrant ape.” Another hominin “represents a dead end in man’s ancestry” and a third is “another extinct race of Homo sapiens.”

It was meant to be more of a line-up of major paleontological primates in a vague chronological order. Howell himself once said, “the artist didn’t intend to reduce the evolution of man to a linear sequence ... but it was read that way by viewers ... the graphic overwhelmed the text.” And, one of Zallinger’s daughters claimed her father had drawn the figures individually and had worried that the linear layout would misrepresent “from a scientific point of view, how this whole evolution occurred.”

Misconception: We’re descended from apes.

Among people who still doubt evolution, there’s a popular rhetorical fallacy that supposedly pokes holes in the theory: If humans evolved from apes, then why are there still apes? The question seems to suggest that humans couldn’t be descended from apes because apes would have disappeared as humans evolved. And, believe it or not, they’re half-right.

But first, let’s get the part they’re wrong about out of the way. As we just showed, humans and other species don’t evolve linearly. Apes didn’t progress to humans. So it’s completely reasonable for humans to coexist with apes.

But here’s what they get right: Humans are not descended from apes. Early humans didn’t emerge from the genetic soup of chimpanzees or gorillas. Instead, early humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor that lived maybe 18 to 14 million years ago. The last common ancestor we share with chimpanzees, our closest non-human relative, lived between 8 and 6 million years ago. 

Imagine the pattern of evolution as the branch of a tree. At the thickest part of the branch is the common ancestor. The places where smaller branches emerge from the main trunk represent “speciation events”: situations that caused the common ancestor to evolve into new species. In the middles of these branches are early hominins like Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo species, as well as extinct ape-like species. At the very ends of the smallest branches are modern organisms: lesser apes like gibbons, great apes like chimps and orangutans, and us. 

Scientists still don’t know much about our common ancestor. Known fossils from the time of the first speciation events amount to a few broken jawbones and teeth. But a 2017 study in Nature offered some clues: Researchers reported the discovery of the most complete Miocene fossil ape cranium to date. The 13-million-year-old skull, which is about the size of a lemon, belonged to an infant of a new species, Nyanzapithecus alesi, who lived in present-day Kenya and likely had some features that resembled a gibbon. Its teeth and skull characteristics suggest it might have eaten fruit and moved slowly through trees. At some point in the distant past, this species (or something like it) may have evolved into the diverse great apes we recognize today, including ourselves.

Misconception: Early humans hunted dinosaurs.

Let’s nip this surprisingly common misconception in the bud. Aside from birds, which are technically dinosaurs, early humans did not coexist with the terrible lizards. The first definitive dinosaurs emerged around 230 million years ago. Well known species like Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus lived between 155 and 145 million years ago, give or take a couple million, in the Late Jurassic period. T. rex, Triceratops, and Velociraptor lived in the Late Cretaceous, about 70 million years ago. 

Then, about 66 million years ago, most scientists believe a massive asteroid hit our planet and killed off all the dinos except for the ancestors of modern-day birds. A few dozen million years pass before the earliest of early humans emerge. 

There was no overlap between non-avian dinosaurs and early humans, a fact easily proven by the fossil record. So why is this misconception so persistent? One big reason: creationism.

Young Earth Creationists believe the universe was created just as it’s described in Genesis, the first book of the Bible’s Old Testament. In a nutshell, God is said to have created the entire world in six days, including humans and presumably dinosaurs, roughly 6000 years ago. Countless animal species populated the planet until God got mad at humans’ misbehavior and wiped out everything with a giant flood, excepting only the creatures that Noah took aboard his ark. The descendants of those few animals roam Earth today. 

You’ll notice that evolution doesn’t fit into this equation. In very broad terms, Creationists reject Darwin’s scientifically accepted theory and argue that God made all creatures perfectly as they appear in the present day.

This fringe belief system emerged during the religious revivals of the early 19th century in the United States and really got popular after the Civil War, especially among Baptist congregations in the South. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859, giving the movement a handy enemy to rail against. But as Darwin’s evidence for evolution held up to scrutiny, some religious leaders sought an interpretation of scripture that would account for both scientific fact and Biblical tradition. This attempt at compromise caused many devout creationists to dig in even deeper and brought more fundamentalist Christians over to their cause.

The ideological battle intensified in the early 20th century and eventually came to a head in the infamous Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925. Quick refresher: Tennessee high school teacher John T. Scopes was accused of violating the Butler Act, a state law banning the teaching of evolution. The American Civil Liberties Union swooped in on his behalf—finding a teacher who violated the law and bringing a test case was their idea—arguing that the law was unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. Two celebrity lawyers argued each side’s case in a theatrical trial, breathlessly covered by radio and newspapers, that pitted religious belief against scientific fact. The jury found the law constitutional and Scopes guilty, though his conviction was overturned on a technicality and he ended up not having to pay a $100 fine.

The sensational trial put creationism on the map, and creationists sought evidence that would further support their Biblical assertions, which brings us to our final misconception.

Misconception: “Ancient” artifacts prove humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

Around the same time as the Scopes monkey trial unfolded, a deputy sheriff named Charles Manier dug up some strange artifacts near Tucson, Arizona. The lead alloy objects bore Latin words and dates before 1000 CE, and one of the items had what looked like an outline of a brontosaurus carved in it—suggesting that the carver had drawn it from life, thus supporting the creationist timeline. Archaeologists at various museums declared the objects obvious forgeries, but while the dinosaur wasn’t a major part of the discovery, it helped plant the seed of anti-Darwinist, human-dinosaur coexistence.

By the 1930s, along the Paluxy River in Texas, residents had found many legitimate dinosaur tracks in limestone from the Early Cretaceous, about 100 million years old. Among them, some said, were fossilized human footprints. Ronald T. Bird, a paleontologist with the American Museum of Natural History, examined the tracks at the site and claimed in a 1939 article that the dinosaur prints were made by a brontosaurus—the first such evidence of the species. The “man tracks,” however, weren’t real. They were created when dinosaur footprints had eroded into an elongated shape, or had been carved by locals as a tourist attraction. But creationists pounced on the findings. As one creationist leader told Texas Monthly in 1982, “One dinosaur or bron­tosaurus track found in situ with one human footprint is sufficient to bring the whole Darwinian theory down and to revolutionize all biology today.” And they felt the Paluxy tracks did just that.

Two more hoaxes offered scenes of human-dino interaction. A shopkeeper named Waldemar Julsrud “discovered” a tiny clay figure in the dirt outside Acámbaro, Mexico, in 1944. Thinking it could be an ancient relic, he asked some local farmers to bring him any others that they found, for which he would pay one peso each. They eventually handed over more than 32,000 figurines, some of which depicted dragons, UFOs, and humans riding dinosaurs. Mexican and American archaeologists examined the collection and instantly designated them as fakes inspired by comic books and monster movies. 

A similar hoax in 1966 involved the “discovery” of supposedly ancient stones in Ica, Peru, carved with images of dinosaurs; a collector named Javier Cabrera Darquea started buying these stones, mostly from a local farmer, and amassed more than 11,000 over the years. In 1973, though, the farmer admitted to fabricating the Ica stones using pictures from comic books and magazines. As one historian of hoaxes noted, “The Ica Stones clearly are not the most sophisticated of the archaeological hoaxes … but they certainly rank up there as the most preposterous.” Nevertheless, some continue to believe that this string of 20th-century forgeries proves humans lived alongside dinosaurs. Sorry, but unless we’re in a Steven Spielberg flick, it doesn’t seem likely.

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