How Homo sapiens became world’s dominant species
‘First Peoples’ engagingly describes humans’ rise, global spread
ADAM OR EVE The new miniseries First Peoples tells the story of how humans emerged in Africa and went on to colonize the rest of the world. Found in Ethiopia, this roughly 195,000-year-old skull known as Omo I is the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil.
Courtesy of Tim Lambert/Wall to Wall Media
No superhero’s origin story is more epic than our own: Some 200,000 years ago, the first modern humans arose in Africa and went on to take over the world. This remarkable feat is chronicled in the series First Peoples, which begins airing on PBS June 24.
The series consists of five hour-long episodes that focus on how Homo sapiens emerged in Africa and then spread to Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas. The series provides a compelling overview of the major human evolution discoveries of the last several years. It also methodically dismantles outdated notions about our origins.
First Peoples tackles many big questions, including who the first Americans were (SN: 12/27/14, p. 29), why the Neandertals went extinct (SN: 9/20/14, p. 11) and how our ancestors entered and dispersed across Asia. One thing quickly becomes clear: Early human history is not as straightforward as once thought.
The emergence of humans, for instance, can’t be traced to a single birthplace (SN: 10/20/12, p. 9). Instead, numerous populations across Africa, linked through social and trade networks, contributed to the modern human gene pool; different physical features probably originated in different parts of Africa, the series explains. And even after H. sapiens established itself, early people interbred with archaic hominids in Africa, Asia and Europe. Long after those species went extinct, bits of their DNA live on in modern people.
The rise of genetics as a powerful tool in the study of human evolution is a recurring theme in the series. At times, the emphasis on DNA overshadows the continuing importance of fossils and stone artifacts in learning about ancient people. Yet overall, First Peoples does a great job of weaving together interdisciplinary lines of evidence.
The series concludes with an intriguing suggestion about how modern humans conquered the world. Our ancestors were not necessarily more intelligent than neighboring hominids, just more social. By maintaining social ties across groups through symbolic culture, modern humans could move into new environments and grow in number, eventually overwhelming more scattered, isolated hominid populations.
