Name: 古人類学者だけど「原始人」について質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-03-15T09:30:13.000Z
Duration: 17 min 38 s
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Let's answer some questions from the internet.

We often think of cavemen as having clubs.

But we know that by the time humans were moving into Ice Age Europe, that they had really long spears, like six or seven feet tall.

And we know sometimes they were tipping those spears with stone like this, to make lethal, sharp, stabbing spears.

Early modern humans had real long range projectile weaponry, like bow and arrow, and in some places, spear throwers.

The spear has a knock on the other end, which fits into that hook.

And so the spear would just be held parallel to the spear thrower.

And then when you throw it, it allows you to propel the spear over a distance of about 40 meters, or about 120 feet.

I had 89% of the Neanderthal variant of all in their system.

You have more Neanderthal genes than 89% of the people who submitted their DNA.

Now, most of us only have a small proportion of Neanderthal genes, only about one to 4%.

Early members of our species migrated out of Africa.

They met and sometimes interbred with the Neanderthals.

So if you have any ancestry from Europe or from Asia, you probably have got some Neanderthal genes.

We have complete genomes of several Neanderthals.

We're able to know, for instance, that some Neanderthals had red hair.

So you might think, hey, if I have red hair, maybe I got that from Neanderthals.

But it actually turns out that it is a different gene that causes the red hair in Neanderthals.

So not all redheads are descended from Neanderthals.

But because most redheads are European, most redheads have got some Neanderthal genes in them.

Atslugamopotamus asks, you think Ice Age is historically accurate?

Well, it actually is pretty, pretty accurate.

You see in this clip here, some animals moving past these gigantic, thick ice sheets.

Most of the animals that are depicted in Ice Age, giant ground sloths, woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, were actually around here in North America.

In places, the ice sheets were as much as two and a half miles thick.

And I love the way that they depict the barren land and just dirt around the glaciers.

When you have ice sheets like that, you get deserts forming right up against them because the ice sheets suck all the moisture out of the atmosphere and create snow over the ice sheets.

I think that the humans that they depict are also pretty accurate.

We find bone needles in the archaeological record beginning about 30,000 years ago.

And that indicates people were able to stitch together clothing.

But there are a couple of things that are inaccurate.

You wouldn't see animals up near the ice sheets.

And the other thing is, there are no saber-toothed squirrels in the fossil record.

At andydoodle56 asks, okay, paleoanthropology nerds, what species is the Geico caveman anyway?

Looking at the brow ridge morphology and the really big nose and the facial architecture, it looks a lot like a Neanderthal.

Atshrestha Alishna asks, what happened to Neanderthals?

Modern humans moved into their territory, out-competed them, and out-reproduced them.

They were short and stocky and very muscular.

They also had short limbs, short arms and short legs.

So that reduced the surface area by which they lost heat.

And they had kind of a strange architecture of the nose and face, which also helped them deal with cold air that they were breathing.

Those bodies were really good at producing heat, but that's not good for conserving energy.

They were costly to move, costly to feed, costly to keep warm.

And so they didn't have a lot of room left over in their energy budgets to devote to reproducing.

They had a lot of competition in the form of large, fierce carnivores.

Things like cave lions, cave hyenas, saber-toothed cats, wolves, grizzly bears.

And so probably for much of their history in Europe,

Neanderthals were just hanging on by a thread.

Atroxie Notlalande asks, hey, where did early humans live?

If you look at the earliest stages of human evolution, the first 4 million years is entirely here in Africa, where we've got little ape men, the Australopiths.

We find them here in the Rift Valley, in East Africa, in countries like Kenya,

And we find them in Southern Africa, in cave systems outside of Johannesburg.

By about two and a half million years, members of our own genus, like Homo habilis, start to crop up.

And Homo erectus is the first one to actually leave Africa.

We pick up Homo erectus initially in the Republic of Georgia and then eventually in Indonesia.

And you might wonder, how did Homo erectus get to Indonesia?

Keep in mind, this is during the ice ages.

And during glacial intervals, sea levels drop.

And in places where there's a shallow sea, the seafloor becomes exposed, and Indonesia just becomes a peninsula connected to the southern part of Asia.

And so Homo erectus could walk out to those islands.

Most of us would call it Homo heidelbergensis.

Very Homo erectus looking with big brow ridges and a massive face.

These guys up here in Europe gives rise to the Neanderthals.

And in Africa, they evolve into our own species, Homo sapiens, about 300,000 years ago.

And by about 70,000 years ago, they started expanding out of Africa.

And they probably encountered populations of Homo erectus, which they knocked off.

And by 40,000 years ago, they are moving into Europe and starting to encounter the Neanderthals, who they knock off.

And by about 20,000 years, they're all the way up here in Eastern Siberia, and they cross the Bering Land Bridge, where they become the Native Americans that we know today.

At Reality Seeker asks, did cavemen have a sense of humor?

This is a depiction of an ibex, which is a kind of a wild goat.

You know, you can see its head here and its body and its legs.

And it's got something coming out of its rear end here, which maybe is the first poop joke.

At iamrwkali asks, how did humans survive the Ice Age?

Gosh, I can hardly bear to be outside for more than five minutes when the temperature drops below zero degrees Celsius.

Neanderthals had fire, sure, but these early modern humans in Europe probably had better pyrotechnology, hearths which channeled the airflow so they could really stoke the fire.

When the Ice Age is really ramped up, they stayed put and they just hunkered down and dealt with it.

At Ahasty Retweet asks, you know how they discovered those fossils of three feet tall early humans in Indonesia?

They called them hobbits as a nickname, which is really cool, but they really missed an opportunity to call them Neandershorts.

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古人類学者だけど「原始人」について質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan

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