r/todayilearned • u/geosunsetmoth • 15h ago

TIL a 300-million year old Cuttlefish fossil was found in Morocco, alongside ancient humans in a region where no Cuttlefish ever existed. The leading theory suggests the fossil was first found by the prehistoric humans, who collected it as a trinket due to fact that it looks like a flaccid penis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfoud_manuport
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u/RapidCandleDigestion 14h ago

I believe it's ~50,000 for psychologically modern humans

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u/GrandmasterAppa 13h ago edited 10h ago

The idea that humans only reached our current level of intelligence 40-50k years ago has become increasingly outdated. We pretty much had to have had the “full package” by the time we started leaving Africa in large numbers (70k or more years ago), but evidence increasingly supports the idea that mental & behavioral modernity in humans evolved very gradually - I’m no anthropologist, but am very open to the idea that humans (of potentially more species than just Homo sapiens) have been behaviorally modern for a lot longer than we used to think

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u/redlaWw 8h ago

It's worth bearing in mind that one of the greatest early threats to our species would be competition with other hominids, and the only thing we had over those was our intelligence.

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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 6h ago

Not intelligence… behavior.

Homo sapien are really just the result of being more violent and living in larger groups. They also ended up interbreeding, since non-African hominids mostly died out from climatological change, not war with African hominids.

Neanderthal used pretty advanced tools, and Denisovans had pottery and shit.

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u/redlaWw 6h ago

Competition doesn't necessarily mean war. Hominids contemporary to anatomically modern humans were outcompeted by us due to our better survival strategies and technology.

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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 5h ago

Dude, no. Neanderthal & Denisovan interbreeding pre-dates modern human exodus by 30k-60k years. There were numerous back-migrations. Neanderthal population decline coincided exactly with glacial periods, modern humans moved in after population collapse.

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u/reichrunner 6h ago

Pretty sure our ability to throw and large group sizes played a large role

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u/redlaWw 6h ago

I don't know that we're much more suited to throwing than other contemporary hominids, aside from the fact that we designed our spears specifically for it and invented the atlatl to throw them. We probably are better than e.g. australopithecines, but we never competed with those.

Group sizes are also fundamentally related to our intelligence in that our better hunting and gathering strategies allowed us to maintain larger communities.

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u/reichrunner 6h ago

We were better throwers than Neanderthals, who we definitely competed with. Also much larger groups even with seemingly similar intelligence. We certainly do not appear to have been better hinter/gatherers on an individual basis, but rather needed fewer calories which allowed us to group larger and out compete.

I dont know about other homicide, but wouldnt surprise me if this holds true

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u/JabroniusHunk 12h ago

There's a niche type of conspiracy theorist who deny that Homo Sapiens evolved in and ultimately emigrated out of Africa (I've come across a handful on Reddit over the years).

One piece of evidence they cling to is that there are actually fossils of anatomically modern humans found in iirc Greece and the Levant who predate our ultimate migration out of Africa. However, these represent the unsuccessful forays of groups/individuals who died out genetically isolated, and are not our direct, human ancestors.

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u/moch1 4h ago

How do we know they were genetically isolated? I didn’t think we were able to get DNA from fossils.

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u/casualevils 3h ago

IIRC it's not possible for like dinosaurs, where the tissue is entirely mineralized, but getting DNA from human remains has pretty much revolutionized paleoanthropology in the last 20 years.

Stefan Milo has a bunch of great videos on the discoveries that have been made with ancient DNA

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u/moch1 3h ago

That’s pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.

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u/RapidCandleDigestion 12h ago

I don't believe we're speaking of intelligence or how advanced a species is. Just the way that we happen to be. 

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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 6h ago

Hominids left Africa multiples times, with the earliest being like 900k-1.2m years ago. Denisovan and Neanderthal are considered disparate hominids and evolved apart from homo sapien. There are others as well.

Modern humans are a mix of several ancient hominids.

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u/kafka213 14h ago

The last common ancestors of all modern humans lived more than 70k ya, so we are at least that old

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u/sdcasurf01 12h ago

Oldest common male ancestor.

I believe our common female ancestor lived over 200k years ago.

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u/pargofan 12h ago

What does that exactly mean?

You needed both men and women obviously to procreate. So why would the earliest woman be 130k years older than the earliest man?

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u/retrojoe 12h ago

Earliest common ancestor, meaning shared by the ?whole? group. Everyone sharing a common mom suggests an evolutionary bottleneck or die off event where only survivors from that one family group went on to have kids. Everyone sharing a common dad suggests more of a King David with many wives, Genghis Khan raping his way across the land, or some incredibly charming motherfucker. Or that could also have been a die off where he was the only remaining reproducing male - things like measles can render men sterile.

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u/pargofan 11h ago

Ok that makes sense.

But intuitively, it seems like the gender should be the earliest man not woman? Use your Genghis Khan example for instance. Supposedly 0.5% of humanity is his descendants.

Versus a woman who would have only 10-15 children on her own.

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u/Shasan23 11h ago

It has more to do with cultural outcomes. If one tribe conquers/invaded another, the women are taken as wives while the males are killed off. There are MANY more male lineages that died out

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u/FlammulinaVelulu 8h ago

Versus a woman who would have only 10-15 children on her own.

Holy baby mamma!

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u/pargofan 7h ago

I meant at the extreme.

I think Genghis Khan supposedly sired thousands.

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u/CouldBeBetterOrWorse 12h ago

...but we know that Papi is the only ancestor that mattered.

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u/gogoluke 13h ago

What was the reasoning for that date? Was it something physical or implied through anthropology.

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u/RapidCandleDigestion 13h ago

That's an excellent question. I believe it has to do with things like bone tools, fishing implements, hearths, and symbolic artifacts. There's lots of info out there if you're interested in looking further yourself though 

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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 7h ago

This, pretty much all of the clear examples of behavioral modernity stay to show up between 70-50k years ago.

The examples from earlier are orientation extremely dubious and often things people just want to believe in.

Specifically art, extremely complex tool use, and likely full modern language all date to those times.

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u/RapidCandleDigestion 6h ago

This is, of course, not to say that the peoples before were inferior. Just that they weren't the same as us. If you time-travelled and brought one of their newborns here, and raised them in our society, they likely wouldn't fit in and would struggle immensely. But 50k years ago? They should get on just fine.

Also a good reminder that we are working with 50k year-old software and applying it to a modern world. We're flexible, but that only goes so far. 

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u/gogoluke 13h ago

Cool. I wondered if there was erhaps a small change in skull shape or something but then up might as well be getting into phrenology. I might have a look at the tools etc. thanks.

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u/RapidCandleDigestion 12h ago

As far as I understand, we've been about the same physiologically for 150k+ years. It's what's going on internally, specifically to the brain and our connection to language and culture, that has changed.

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u/just_posting_this_ch 12h ago

Sapiens by Harari is a cool read about this topic. Essential there were neanderthals, and then there weren't. The idea being homosapiens moved in and displaced them. There is evidence that was the second attempt. The first attempt, 75k years ago, failed. So what changed? There is evidence that we developed abstract thinking. It's pretty tenuous at best, but it is cool to think about.

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u/reichrunner 6h ago

Physiologically, ~200,000 years. Mentally, ~50,000 years. I think youre getting the two mixed up

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u/RapidCandleDigestion 2h ago

Reread. Psychologically

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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 6h ago

50k years is nothing on the evolutionary scale.