Joe > Recent Status Updates

at least his descriptions of the desert are nice...

Finally, an evolving imagination created geographies of other times and spaces.

Three connected elements are central:
* timing of global dispersal and expansion, where archaeology and genetics underpin understanding the knowledge of movement.
* growth of brain size
* changing environment that frames the process of cultural and biological evolution

Deep history of humans is driven by two themes: brain growth (encephalisation) and increase in global settlement.

Global settlement happened quite late in hominin evolution - before 50,000 years ago, about a quarter of the planet was settled by hominins.

Our imagination began to relate to people when they were not present and to behave as if they were. We came to treat objects in ways similar to people.

The hominins, like the hominids (humans and hominins along with African and Asian great apes) inhabited only the old world. They were restricted for more than three million years to parts of the continents of Africa, Asia and its European arm. In contrast to the African expansion starting 60,000 years ago, these hominins were bounded by a reluctance to cross water and climb mountains.

Chapter one - The worlds of deep human history

* Seed population of Africans that some 60,000 years ago (60ka) began the process of expansion which settled the whole world.

* The starting point is different - the people involved were not humans but hominins, a grouping that includes humans and all our extinct ancestors (e.g European Neanderthals and African australopithecines).