There's building evidence that my idea might be right! Not an idea I thought of on my own. One I adopted.
So, bear with me. Please.
I love this stuff!
We keep finding, and seemingly every new decade, that Homo sapiens are older than we once thought. And my idea, and many archaeologist's idea, is that we date back to a million years.
Many hominids do indeed date back over a million years, and like I said, I'm pretty sure we're one of them.
Here's the thing, y'all! A new find has just emerged, and data indicates that maybe we indeed started as a species over a million years ago. And if not, maybe close to that date range.
So, I fell down a rabbit hole. Come with me. Just for a sec.
Scientists found a skull in China called Yunxian 2. They dug it up way back in 1990, but it was smashed almost flat, so nobody could really tell what it was. They just decided it belonged to an old human relative called Homo erectus and put it on a shelf for thirty years. Why? Because it was about a million years old, and everybody was sure that nothing that old could look anything like us.
Then a team put it in a computer and carefully un-smashed it. And the face surprised everyone because parts of it looked old, but other parts, like a rounder skull and a bigger brain, looked a lot more like us. That's a big deal, because it means our own family branch might be way older than people thought. More like over a million years old.
Now, a completely different group of scientists were studying human DNA instead of bones, and they ended up with almost the same exact conclusion.
So one team looked at a skull, another team looked at DNA, and strangely, and without knowing it, gave us similar stats.
I feel like I just repeated myself.
Yep, I did.
Anyway, the story of "us", Homo sapiens, keeps getting wilder by the decade. Just over a hundred years ago, it was unheard of to think us more than 20,000 years old. Each decade, it bumped up like 20,000 years, give or take. In 2017, we found a Homo sapiens bone in Morocco dating back 315,000 years. Every time people say "okay, this is as far back as it goes," they dig up something proving them wrong.
We live in this little sliver of time, with brains that don't like to think us much bigger than we are now, whether it's technology or agriculture or life spans or even how long we've journeyed on Earth as a species.
As some of you know, I write about ancient civilizations, ancient artifacts, ancient aliens, ancient hominids, and many of it tied to ancient mythology... mythologies that tie together almost perfectly even though these cultures were oceans apart.
I write that ALL because I believe it, and I think it's odd that we believe, without evidence, that we couldn't have been more advanced than we are now. That we emerged as civilization builders just under 10,000 years ago.
If humanity left our world right now, in under 5,000 years, all of it would be dust. From our skyscraper-ridden cities to every neighborhood, port, factory, and winery and farm, it'd be wiped clean by Earth, and actually most of by under 1,000 years. What would be standing? Rocks. Anything made from massive rocks. Not cement. Rocks. Built in a specific way to remain standing for a long, long time.
Imagine a species living a million years, or heck, 315,000 years, with the same brains, similar minds, same hands, same feet, same faces, and taking 305,000 years to make its first farm and decide, finally...
Anyway, I don't buy it. And I don't think you have to be some wild-eyed guy in a tinfoil hat to not buy it either. You just have to look at how fast our own stuff would turn to dust, then ask what a hundred cultures before us might have left behind, and 99.99999% of it turning back to dirt.
That's a dang big rabbit hole. Anybody else down here with me?
