Paleolithic tools. Photo: Roberto Sáez

Last week I was invited to give a speech in Lisbon for an enterprise forum on Innovation, as introduction to ease the topic and break ice. First challenge was to illustrate how humans are continuously looking for innovation solutions, and always were since the origin of ‘becoming human’. Human Evolution has always been linked to Innovation. Second challenge was to make it understandable for a non-expert and multi-country audience…

Given those premises, I structured 5 key ideas:

1) The journey until reaching the capacity of innovation we currently have is amazing: we can develop projects and build things from the lowest atom level until the greatest global level – and even outside the globe. But we actually started 6 million years ago when our ancestors were ‘normal’ animals, in fact weak animals: they were eaten by predators. Eventually some of them started to use bipedalism occasionally. But yet they did not have anything special that could differentiate us from any other animals. They lived among them, they shared same resources. Sigue leyendo →

La Ferrassie-1 Neandertal. Photo: Roberto Sáez

The extinction of Neandertals is a huge challenge for paleoanthropologists. Neandertals and modern humans are believed to have evolved from a common ancestor about 500,000 years ago. Some researchers usually thought of Homo heidelbergensis as this common ancestor, but other hypothesis suggests that Homo heidelbergensis existed as an species only in an European niche, whilst there is a new parent species yet to be found. In any case, the ancestor evolved into Neandertals in Europe and Homo sapiens in Africa. Neandertals lived in Eurasia 200,000 years before Homo sapiens arrived from Africa. About 60,000 years ago, succesful migrations of African modern humans came into Eurasia and then also quickly to Western Europe. It is not known when they first met Neandertals, but genetic evidence shows interbreeding between both species in different periods.

A study by Tom Higham et al set the extinction of the last Neandertals around 40,000 years ago. It is based on radiocarbon dating from 40 sites across Europe. Assuming that Homo sapiens first reached Europe about 45,000 years ago, this implies a period of Neandertals & sapiens coexistence of between 5,000 and 10,0000 years.

However, the study does not include remains from Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, where Neandertals apparently survived until c. 30,000 years ago.

Sigue leyendo →

Final assignment of the course ‘Human Evolution, Past and Future’ (University of Wisconsin–Madison, instructor John Hawks). The objective was to describe a plausible scenario for human evolution into the future, with the form of an essay. This work was rated with the maximum grade by four peer assessors.