Genetic Study Pushes Back Timeline for First Significant Human Population Expansion

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130924174338.htm

This article is about the idea that we as humans had our first rapid and significant expansion much before then we previously thought. Scientists thought that humans as a species had the first significant expansion when we had successfully started farming and herding, but recent findings show that the first successful human expansion dates back to the Pal eolithic period which was 60 to 80 thousand years ago rather than the Neolithic period as previously thought. This is really interesting because 60 to 80 thousand years ago we had still been hunter gatherers. The reason this is interesting is that we were pretty much animals who lived in colonies so that just had happened to evolve differently because of our large brains. Back then we were just blank slates with the possibility, the capacity to evolve in a way that was separate from just the physical. The really interesting thing is that in areas where there was a large Pal eolithic expansion at some time or another the Neolithic expansion was much more successful. The article gives the following example: “ Indeed, the authors also demonstrate that the populations who adopted a sedentary farming lifestyle during the Neolithic had previously experienced the strongest Paleolithic expansions. Conversely, contemporary nomadic herder populations in Eurasia experienced moderate Paleolithic expansions, and no expansions were detected for nomadic hunter-gatherers in Africa.” This shows us that the areas with the most prosperous Pal eolithic period formed some of the greatest civilizations later on. The reason I had chosen this article is because we are doing a unit of population now and I thought that it was interesting that the prosperity of a part of the world is linked to something that happened 60 to 80 thousand years ago.