Page 473 - Cultures and Organizations

438 IMPLICATIONS

intensified about forty thousand years ago, and since then all species died
out but Homo sapiens. Today human genetic variation is largest on the
African continent, testifying to the small size of the early human groups
that founded non-African populations.

Forty Thousand to Ten Thousand Years Ago:
Creative Spark, Extermination

Our ancestors start to show signs of much richer art and technology from
around eighty thousand years ago in southern Africa and around thirty-two
thousand years ago in Europe. This latter period is called the Aurignacien,
for the site of artistic cave paintings of many species of animals found in
what is now Aurignac, France. The oldest statuettes of voluptuous female

figures, such as the recently uncovered “Venus of Hohle Fels,” likewise date
from this period. People also started to hunt dangerous animals. Whether
they also actively fought their close relatives is not certain as yet. However
that may be, Homo neanderthaliensis and the descendants of Homo erectus
both died out less than some thirty thousand years ago, the fi rst group in
what is now Spain, the second on the Indonesian island of Flores.
According to geneticists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, 12
Neanderthals and modern humans may well have mixed their genes.
Their lineages split half a million years earlier, diverging enough to cre-
ate genetic differences but not enough to create infertility. When modern
humans followed Neanderthal-style humans out of Africa, the groups met.
The Neanderthals had specialized in hunting big game and may have had

collaborative skills that benefited the moderns. The moderns outcompeted
the Neanderthals, probably because of better technology, enhanced lan-
guage capacities, or more trade with distant others, or perhaps because of
resistance to diseases. Trade and disease could be related. The moderns

13
already traded over long distances, which the Neanderthals never did, and
trade leads first to contagion and subsequently to the spread of resistance

to diseases.
Many non-African larger animals were exterminated by humans.
Humans now became much more numerous and migrated to all the conti-
nents, leaving only some isolated islands not colonized. Waves of migration
were associated with extermination of other species. In Eurasia mammoths
died out where human fossils appeared. Whether hunting or other fac-
tors—for instance, small genetic diversity and climate change—caused the
demise of the mammoth is still controversial. For other species the picture