THE DAWN OF HOMO SAPIENS: What Earth Was Like When We Appeared | Full Documentary

In 2017 a team announced that they had been wrong about where we come from — and wrong by about a hundred thousand years. The place was a hillside in Morocco called Jebel Irhoud, an old barite mine fifty kilometres from the Atlantic coast. It had been dug into in the 1960s, and skulls had come out of it, and for fifty years those skulls sat in the awkward category of things nobody could place. They looked almost modern. They also looked wrong in ways that were hard to name. Then a team led by Jean-Jacques Hublin went back, excavated properly, and dated the burnt flint lying among the bones. Three hundred and fifteen thousand years. That is not a refinement. Until that morning, the oldest Homo sapiens anywhere were about two hundred thousand years old, from Ethiopia, and the story of our origin had a tidy shape: we appeared in East Africa, in one place, at one time, and spread out from there. Jebel Irhoud is on the opposite side of the continent. And the face on those skulls is, in the words of the people who found it, a face you would not look twice at in a crowd today. The back of the head is another matter entirely. This film is about the moment our species begins — and about the discovery that it was not a moment, it was not one place, and the thing that makes us different was the last part to arrive, not the first. In this documentary you will discover: • Jebel Irhoud, and how burnt flint in a hearth started a clock we could read 315,000 years later • Why radiocarbon is useless here, and the four other clocks that replace it • The pan-African model: our species as a network that converged, not a population that appeared • Florisbad, Omo Kibish and Herto — four corners of a continent, four combinations of features • "Mitochondrial Eve" — what the 1987 finding actually said, and the confusion caused by the name • Why the difference between us and the Neanderthals is not brain size but brain SHAPE • Globularity: the round head arrives up to 200,000 years after the modern face • The Levallois method — striking a core for a flake you will not remove for another twenty blows • Blombos Cave: an ochre workshop in two abalone shells, and the oldest known drawing at 73,000 years • Olorgesailie, 300,000 years ago: obsidian carried ninety kilometres, which means a trade network • The graves at Skhul and Qafzeh — and why the Neanderthals appear to have buried their dead too • The green Sahara: Lake Mega-Chad at the size of the Caspian Sea, and rivers mapped by radar under Libyan sand • Gobero in Niger — a cemetery with harpoons and hippo bones, in the middle of the desert • Toba, 74,000 years ago: the eruption that supposedly nearly killed us, and the evidence that it did not • The real bottleneck — and why African populations carry more genetic diversity than everyone else combined • Misliya and Apidima: the earlier exits from Africa that left no descendants • Svante Pääbo, 2010, and the 1 to 2 per cent of Neanderthal DNA in everyone outside Africa • The Denisovans — a population named from a finger bone, known from almost no bones at all • FOXP2, and why "Neanderthals could speak" was too strong a claim • Why the Neanderthals ended without a war — we probably did not out-think them, we out-networked them • The eyed needle, and the body louse that dates the invention of clothing Every claim here is anchored to named researchers, published papers and real sites. Where the evidence is contested, this film says so. 📚 KEY SOURCES: • Hublin, J.-J. et al. — New fossils from Jebel Irhoud and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens (Nature, 2017) • Richter, D. et al. — The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud (Nature, 2017) • Scerri, E. M. L. et al. — Did our species evolve in subdivided populations across Africa? (TREE, 2018) • Neubauer, S., Hublin, J.-J. & Gunz, P. — The evolution of modern human brain shape (Science Advances, 2018) • Cann, R. L., Stoneking, M. & Wilson, A. C. — Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution (Nature, 1987) • Henshilwood, C. S. et al. — A 100,000-year-old ochre-processing workshop at Blombos Cave (Science, 2011) • Brooks, A. S. et al. — Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest MSA (Science, 2018) • Hershkovitz, I. et al. — The earliest modern humans outside Africa (Science, 2018) • Harvati, K. et al. — Apidima Cave fossils provide earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia (Nature, 2019) • Green, R. E. et al. — A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome (Science, 2010) • Reich, D. et al. — Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave (Nature, 2010) • Smith, E. I. et al. — Humans thrived in South Africa through the Toba eruption (Nature, 2018) • Sereno, P. C. et al. — Lakeside cemeteries in the Sahara (PLOS ONE, 2008) Images: Paul C. Sereno et al.; Hanay (CC BY) - Wikimedia Commons #HomoSapiens #HumanEvolution #JebelIrhoud #Prehistory #Palaeoanthropology #Neanderthal #Denisovan #AncientDNA #Archaeology #LostEras