Who were the first humans? What does even that mean?
There are many ways to talk about the “first humans”. There was no magical point where suddenly a chimpanzee decided to stand up, shave off its fur and start talking. Instead, gradually over millions of years, animals like chimpanzees slowly evolved to lose their hair, stand up, develop bigger brains and eventually became us.
This means the traits we consider “human” developed slowly at different times over millions of years. For example:
– the first apes that could walk upright (a bit awkwardly) were roughly 3 million years ago – see our post on Austrolopithicus;
– the first apes that could walk and comfortably run upright were 2 million years ago – see our post on Homo erectus;
– we lost our body hair about 2 million years ago – again see Homo erectus;
– our faces, skulls, and skeletons were indistinguishable from modern humans 300,000 years ago – again our post on “Anatomical modernity“;
– the first most basic tools stone tools were 3 million years ago – but nothing really like a blade until 400,000 years ago – see our tools post;
– the first permanent settlements, where people started farming were roughly 10,000 years ago – see our post on early agriculture; and
– the first cities, written language, and governments occurred roughly 7,000 years ago – see our Sumeria post.
Let’s dive in, to the first humans.
So who were the first humans?
It is very easy to think humans are very special – and that no other species could compare to us.
A lot of the traits we like to think of as uniquely human, already exist in the animal kingdom in some way. Many animals have sophisticated ways of communication, even languages. For instance, Prairie dogs use words to tell each other if a predator is approaching and are able to describe the direction, color, and size of the incoming threat. Many birds use sophisticated tools and problem-solving skills, crows recognize human faces and will form alliances. Chimpanzees actually have better short-term memory than most humans.
So one could say, the traits of humanity started with the advanced primates of roughly 3 million years ago. They lived in groups, used basic tools, took care of each other and probably had some pretty sophisticated language. If you are looking for a point where you had a species that suddenly was starting to act and behave significantly differently to the animals around them, then Australopithecus is the start of humanity. However, physically, they looked pretty close to chimpanzees. They certainly couldn’t run, hunt and dominate the landscape like later humans. If you saw one walking down the street today, you’d be pretty taken aback.
The first time we get a sophisticated hunter, able to run, looking pretty close to us is 2 million years ago. They were certainly most sophisticated in most ways – their tools were better, they could communicate better. They had lost their hair. However, they would still probably look pretty weird in a T-shirt, they had a thick, heavy skull and smaller brains. They certainly didn’t write or create a lot of art.
The earliest art was only 50,000 years ago. We have a whole post on this, some of it is gorgeous. But written language and government is still thousands of years away – see our Sumeria post.
So when would human ancestors look normal in a T-shirt?
Probably the most obvious choice for “first humans” is about 400,000 years ago, with the advent of anatomically modern humans (see here). That is the moment we start having real difficulty telling the skeletons of modern humans and old humans apart. So they would probably have looked just like us, if you put them in a T-shirt.
But we need to be careful thinking about our ancestors like this. Firstly, most people are not as observant as they think they are. For example, in the Superman comics, Clarke Kent disguises himself so people don’t recognize him as superman just by wearing a pair of glasses. People liked to make fun of this, saying it was unrealistic and that people around him would have recognized him. However, Henry Cavill, the actor who plays Superman, wandered around New York with a pair of glasses to test the theory. And no one recognized him. Context is everything. If you genuinely saw one of our ancestors wandering around on a street in a T-shirt, they would probably need to look very weird for you to genuinely question if they were human. They’d need to look pretty close to a chimpanzee.
You would almost certainly not think a Neanderthal, or maybe even a Homo erectus was weird if you saw them in a T-shirt. They might still be a bit shorter, a bit on the stockier size with a more prominent nose. But frankly, there are plenty of people walking around today who look a bit weird. They would be within range we’d register as humans today – at worst maybe you’d think they had some sort of deformity or condition.
The thing that really differentiates early and modern humans, was our language and communication, not our physical appearance. So perhaps a better question is, would you be able to tell an early human from us in a classroom? When would they be able to learn as quickly as we do?
Were early humans, even human?
So, when did we get human cognitive capacity? When were we able to learn in the way we can today? If we took an ancient human and put them in a human classroom, when would they be able to keep up?
This is a really hard question to answer. Because despite the fact we were physically identical to modern humans at 300,000 years ago, it was only 50,000 years ago that we started making complex paintings and art. The evolution of the human consciousness clearly took a very long time. And it is really hard to understand how people thought millions of years ago. All we have are the things we left behind, tools, fossils and bones.
Imagine the opposite experiment. You took a modern human and put them in our ancient environment. You took them away from modern conveniences, fed them an ancient human diet, much less food with less nutritional value and didn’t let them go to school. They wouldn’t learn all the things we all know but take for granted around the Universe, human health and disease. They wouldn’t have regular doctor’s appointments or first-world medical care, so they would be suffering from a wide variety of preventable diseases that are almost unheard of in the modern world. They wouldn’t understand what the sun was, what the stars were. They wouldn’t understand how people got pregnant, or why fire burned. They wouldn’t know the shape of the continents, or what the ocean was, or if the Earth was flat. They would have such a radically different view and understanding of the world around them. Frankly, you probably wouldn’t consider this person “human” by modern standards. Because they didn’t have the collectively built infrastructure of humanity to draw upon, they themselves would be very different.
This tells us one very important thing. Humans aren’t really human on their own. Really this is true of all animals, but in particular with human beings. Even once we had the neurological tools to learn and do all the things that modern humans do, it took us more than 250,000 years to work out how to write and build complex things. At some point, its better to stop thinking about when an individual person “became human” and start thinking about “humanity”. Because no one person invented tools, built villages, learned how to control fire, or domesticate animals. This was done incredibly slowly, by thousands of people across the planet at different times, in different ways. The journey is not a journey of small steps for an individual man, it is of giant steps for mankind.
