The Australopithecus, our distant forebear (e.g. “Lucy”), lived during a period (the Pliocene) when global temperatures started by rising to 2–3 °C above our current global average before eventually dropping to the point where much of the planet was periodically covered by a thick coat of ice (the Pleistocene) for 2 million years (a scenario possibly resembling what awaits us).
Yet, even during the ice ages, humans were still on the scene, to begin with in the shape of Homo erectus, some of whom left Africa during the Pleistocene, colonised Eurasia and used fire. Resourceful as they obviously were, these vagabonds were probably not our direct forebears, as H. sapiens are believed to have originated on the Horn of Africa between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago.
Fairly recently, we learnt of the migratory wave of H. sapiens via the Middle East to Eurasia and eventually Australia and South America that set off a mere 70.000–50.000 years ago. There had been several previous migratory waves, and there is even “evidence that modern humans had reached China around 80,000 years ago.”
Practically all of these early waves seem to have gone extinct or retreated back, and present-day humans outside Africa descend mainly from a single expansion about 70,000–50,000 years ago.
Since then, we have seen the rise and fall of empires. We have seen massacres, genocides, devastating wars. To be fair, some of us have also been privileged enough to enjoy the arts, sciences, delicious foodstuffs, vacations abroad… Some humans have devoted their lives to others, to the study of chimps, for instance, to the protection of ecosystems, etc.
Moreover, we are now so scientifically advanced that we know that we share nearly 99 % of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos.
Now that is not encouraging, because chimps, intelligent as they may be, are a nasty piece of work. To be precise, they are male chauvinist, rapist killers. For some reason, popular culture has refused to focus on these obnoxious traits. And to the extent that people had to admit that there were 21 chimp-on-chimp murders in a single national park in Uganda, they have tended to blame proximity to humans. However, several studies have shown that chimp violence is not a result of contact with humans.
In fact, we found that the site with the least violence had the largest human impact, and the site with the most violence was one of the least impacted.
True, bonobos (who have female leaders, by the way) are not murderous though they too engage in fierce but non-lethal quarrels. We share, I repeat, nearly 99 % of our DNA with them too. Similar to the chimps in appearance, bonobos are not carnivorous. (Moreover, they are on the verge of extinction.)
The reason we share so much DNA with chimps and bonobos is that they and we have a common ancestor. According to Wikipedia:
The split between the human and chimpanzee–bonobo lineages, took place around 8–4 million years ago, in the late Miocene epoch. During this split, chromosome 2 was formed from the joining of two other chromosomes, leaving humans with only 23 pairs of chromosomes, compared to 24 for the other apes.
The famous primatologist Jane Goodall (born 1934), having devoted much of her life to chimps, wrote about chimp violence in her 1990 memoir Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe, quoted by Wikipedia in an article about the Gombe Chimpanzee war:
For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind—Satan [one of the apes], cupping his hand below Sniff’s chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; old Rodolf, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi’s prostrate body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Dé’s thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes.
Youtube footage of a chimp grieving for a dead relative or performing acts of kindness tends to move us: “So human!” we exclaim. I take a different tack. Hearing the war cries of human alpha males (and “alpha females”!), I exclaim: “So ape-like!”
Alas, today as in the past, the shots are called by ape-like killer-humans. With such leaders, do we even want to be here after WWIII and climate meltdown?
My worry is not that the human species may disappear. My greatest fear is that those of us who are not ape-like, not killer-humans will suffer immeasurably on our route to extinction, just as the Gazans are suffering today.
But I do not believe the species will be entirely extinguished. Homo has survived in the most uncongenial of circumstances and will as a species survive, even WW III and climate meltdown.
