When Humans Become Modern - Essay Example

?Human beings have had a long and what can only be considered to be a prosperous history since the beginning of their modern era. While this has beenthe case, there has also developed plenty of speculation concerning when humans became modern, and the factors which influenced such a transformation. The fact that modern humans developed can be considered to be a great feat of resilience and adaptation on the part of human which has enabled the species to thrive and ensured that it has propagated itself all over the world. The ability of this species to adapt has also ensured that it has been able to settle even in the most inhospitable regions of the world, where its members have been able to develop the necessary physical characteristics that have promoted their survival (Bar Yosef, 2002). All of the modern human beings are considered to be members of the Homo sapiens species of humans which developed some two hundred thousand years ago with the development of those physical as well as physical characteristics that are also associated with the Neanderthal man. It has now been proven that the Neanderthal man was not a direct ancestor of modern man, and that in fact, they seem to have been contemporaries, each of them competing for the same resources. While this has been the case, most archaeologists now believe that these two species of humans may have been descended from a common ancestor known as Homo heidelbergensis. Despite their being contemporaries, when compared to other species of humans such as the Neanderthal man among others, the modern human seems to have developed a more delicate bone structure. The skull structure of the modern humans seem to have been more rounded than those of the other humanoid species that existed at the time, and this was also accompanied by high foreheads, and less pointed chins (Renfrew, 1996). The latter characteristics have come to be used as a means of identifying modern humans and it is these features which enable scientists to determine a homo sapiens. The first human fossils that were discovered in the modern age were known as the Cro-Magnon and these were found in modern France where they were considered to be very similar to modern Europeans in appearance (Bjelcevic, 2013). The skeletons of these people seemed to be less dense than those of the Neanderthals, and their brain capacities seemed to be large, larger even when compared to that of modern man. The data that has been collected over the past century and a half shows that the early modern humans developed from an archaic ancestor in the region of East Africa. The first skull that depicted the development of modern human beings was one believed to be some 195000 years old found in the Omo valley in Ethiopia. However, while it is the common assumption that modern humans developed in East Africa and latter dispersed to other parts of the world, there have developed new theories concerning the development of the modern humans and their settlement in the rest of the world (McBrearty & Brookes, 2000). As has been stated above, the common assumption is that modern humans developed in Africa and latter scattered to the rest of the world. This is known as the replacement model, and it states that modern humans developed in Africa and later migrated to the rest of the Old World where they gained dominance, eventually replacing the Neanderthals as well as other archaic species of humans. According to this model, modern humans developed between some 200000 and 150000 years ago and over time scattered to the rest of the Old World where they replaced other archaic humans between 60000 and 40000 years ago, as a result becoming the only surviving human species (Mithen, 1998). While this assumption is disputed in some quarters, it is possible that if it is correct, then it can be speculated that all the humans on the planet today may have a common African ancestry since all the other human species that were descended from the Homo erectus are considered to have become extinct (Blythe, 2002). While the African origins of the modern humans is the most popular model, this has been found to have certain flaws many of which are based on the fact that human remains from 200000 years ago are yet to be found in other parts of the Old World other than Africa. This has created a situation where it has become necessary to further develop the replacement model, which is currently the most feasible, to ensure that it accommodates most of the other factors which have contributed to its having flaws (Deacon, 1997). This will ensure that a more accurate explanation for the dispersion of modern humans all over the world is developed so that a precise period of when this species developed can be pointed out. A rival approach to the replacement model is the regional continuity model, which advocates that the modern humans developed almost simultaneously all over the Old World from local archaic human species. This approach assumes that modern humans evolved from archaic human beings which descended from Homo erectus, so that for example, the modern Caucasians can be said to have evolved from local Caucasian archaic species. This model can, therefore, be said to have been developed based on the assumption that the modern humans have great antiquity in place, since they had lived in basically the same place since the earliest stages of their evolution from Homo erectus (Dugger, 2006). Those who uphold to this model accept as true that the mutual progenitor of present hominids was the Homo erectus which developed in Africa and latter moved to the rest of the Old World at an earlier period, around 1.8 million years ago. To explain the common reproductive capabilities among all the human races, this model states that there was sufficient gene-flow between Africa, Asia, and Europe to ensure that the isolation, which normally leads to the development of new species, did not take place among modern humans, hence the lack of the development of distinct human species (DeWalt, 2008). Assimilation model emerged as a new hypothesis which incorporates various old models of evolution of modern humans. Gunter Brauer states that the first modern humans evolved in Africa and later migrated to other regions not replacing human population that previously existed.; modern humans interbred at a limited degree with the late archaic humans resulting in a more hybrid population. The first modern humans in Europe appear in archeological records and existed around 40,000-45,000 years ago. The migration of the Cro-Magnon into Africa regi9on through the eastern Mediterranean coastal route explains Cro-Magnon abrupt appearance. Europe and Neandertals was shared by the Cro-Magnon for over 12,000 years; during these years, it is argued that they interbred leading to a predominant Cro-Magnon that is today’s modern Europeans. An archeological finding made in Romania in 2003 at Pestera cu Oase cave backed this proposition, was the 15-16 years old male Homo sapiens incomplete skeleton that thought to have lived about 30,000 years before, the skeleton had a mix of both old and new anatomical features (Blythe, 2002). According to Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in Saint Louis, Homo sapiens had a skull with characteristics of archaic humans and modern humans explain how they interbred with Neandertals. A report from Alan Templeton of Washington University stated that computer-based analysis of ten different human DNA sequences indicated presence of an interbreeding between people living in Africa, Europe and Asia for over 600,000 years. This report goes consistently with the assumption on the expansion of humans from Africa and the emigrants propagated with populations from Europe and Asia. There is a possibility that migrations went into Africa and if there was an interbreeding, it was a rare event; most skeletons of Neandertals and Cro-Magnon people support the fact that they lack hybrid characteristics (Murphy, 1998). Following the migration of humans to various parts of the world has led to extinction of various animal species that were indigenous to those areas; this has led to the disruption of the ecosystem declining the population of various non-human carnivores and herbivores. Humans triggered trophic cascade and due to the modernity of humans, they were able to change their food quest to mall plants and animals. Aboriginal people arrived in Australia and Polynesians causing dramatic animal extinctions; in all these incidents, human beings were responsible for wiping out species that were easily hunted out. 5,000 years after the arrival of humans, almost 90% of the marsupial species which were larger the domesticated cats were extinct, in addition to this, large flightless birds were extinct following the hunting by human hunters (Hagopian, 2001). Since the last century and a half there has been an explosion in the global human population and technological development has allowed humans to move into various areas of the planet and over-exploit its regions which include the oceans (LaFee, 2003). Exploitation activities done by humans involved cutting down of forest plantations, changing river courses, pollution of wetlands, industrial scale hunting of animals, among others. At the beginning of nineteenth century there existed over 40,000,000 bison that roamed the North America plains and by the end of that century, only a few number of bison remained. Humans used guns in hunting these bison nearly making them extinct; African elephants and rhinoceros have undergone the same fate in the twentieth century. Similarly, there has been the depleting various species of fish by commercial fishermen in the last half century making the government step in and try to stem the tide the effects of human population on other species (Bjelcevic, 2013). There has been marginal success and the World Conservation union has estimated 7,266 animal species together with 8,323 lichen and plant species are at a risk of being extinct due to human degradation that is caused by human species. Some of the endangered species include one third of amphibian species, half the population of tortoise and turtles, quarter of the mammal’s population, a fifth of rays and sharks, and one eighth of the bird population. This does not include millions of other species unknown to the field of science and there is a probability that most of the species will become extinct before scientists describe and study them (DeWalt, 2008). People of today are different from Homo sapiens ancestors in some ways and it is likely that our species has continued to evolve since the last ice age which is approximately 10,000 years ago. The reason for continuous evolution is the growth of human population and moving to new environments that include cities, where they are subjected to new pressures of natural selection. Example is the large and dense population present that has made it easier for people to contract contagious diseases such as smallpox, plagues, influenza, among others which rapidly spread through different communities wreaking havoc (Dugger, 2006). As a result of this, there has been a strong selection of individuals who have had immunization which allow them to survive; besides this, there is a marked change of diet for many people since the last age and the diet is less varied and there has been high dependence on foods that are made from cereal grains. Human species have been able to adapt to these and other new environmental pressures acquired steadily producing greater genetic diversity (Morabia, 2007). There have been more mutations and this has added variations to human genes because of the existence of more people, this takes place despite the rate of mutation per person remaining the same. The rate of mutation may increase based on the fact that humans have been exposed to new kinds of man-made environmental pollution that are able to cause new types of mutations (Sentinel, 2006). Environmental and behavioral change consequences for human species are not clear even though it appears average human size of human species has become shorter for the past 10,000 years despite acquiring wide spread immunity for various severe effects of certain diseases. The direction to which human species will take in the future can be dictated but it is difficult to proof due to innumerable unknown factors; this is certain but evolution continues until the time human species will reach extinction point (Hitchens, 2007). References Bar Yosef, O. 2002. The Upper Palaeolithic Revolution. Annual Review of Anthropology 31 363-93. Bjelcevic, A. 2013, SLOVENE PRE-MODERN LITERATURE IN LITERARY STUDIES AFTER 1990, Slavisticno Drustvo Slovenije, Ljubljana. Blythe, W. 2002, Existence precedes essence. Yup!: Three novels that take place in a premodern world that will never become modern, New York Times Company, New York. DeWalt, R. 2008, THE OCEAN INSIDE, Santa Fe, N.M. Dugger, W.M. 2006, "Veblen's Radical Theory of Social Evolution", Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 651-672. Hagopian, E.C. 2001, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, by Michael Ignatieff, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1997, American Friends Service Committee, Inc, Cambridge. Hitchens: How Paine's 'Rights' Changed The World 2007,, National Public Radio, Washington, D.C. LaFee, S. 2003, Not my type | When it comes to singling out a specimen for classifying humans as a species, it doesn't pay to be particular, San Diego, Calif. Morabia, A. 2007, "Epidemiologic Interactions, Complexity, and the Lonesome Death of Max von Pettenkofer", American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 166, no. 11, pp. 1233-8. 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