How Environmental Genome Might Rewrite Human History

Photo by Gleb Lucky on Unsplash

Basic fact: Humans don’t fossilize well. We don’t find a lot of fossils of Homo sapiens or of other human species. (I am using “human” here to refer to the entirety of genus Homo, just as canine includes wolves and feline includes lions).

Darwin didn’t write much about human evolution not because he was avoiding it for religious reasons, but because he didn’t know. There wasn’t a rich fossil record for him to go by. He was able to reasonably guess that we’re related to apes and that we started out in Africa, which is pretty good given the evidence he used was looking at chimps…

Humans in the Fossil Record

The first fossil of a Neanderthal was found in the Neander valley in 1857 (Neanderthal means “People who lived in the Neander valley”). However, it was a partial skull and it was not recognized.

In fact, the discoverers thought it was a recent skull of some early European tribesman, perhaps of an ethnicity that was now extinct. When Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, he had no fossils to go by. In 1886, more Neanderthal fossils were discovered…and these were easier to date and more complete, and allowed us to see that they were, in fact, different.

Different enough.