| MadSci Network: Evolution |
What do researchers know about the earliest period of Homo sapiens appearance? You’re asking what it was like to be the first member of our species. Although we would all like to think that there was some sort of dramatic shift here – a “super Einstein” of the Paleolithic – I’m afraid that evolutionary change is not that dramatic. Even those who support the more punctuated view of species change, would claim that change is not generally observable within a lifetime. This means that the first truly modern human, and I am assuming that we could even agree on what that means, would have looked and acted pretty much like its parents and its offspring. Only if you allow for the depth of time will the differences become apparent. But if you look in a narrow slice, you cannot see any differences. There are a lot of developmental processes that work like this. When do you become an adult? Do you see the world any differently the day before or the day after? Yet it is obvious to nearly every one that a 30 year-old is different from a 15 year-old. Given this complexity, the question that you ask is more appropriately answered by a poet than by a scientist. Similarly, we really cannot say with any scientific certainty what it was like to be an early modern human. We can speculate, and some of the speculation is fun, but we can’t say for sure. So, right now, I think the best answers to your question can be found in novels. The best one I know that covers this topic is “Dance of the Tiger” by Bjorn Kurten. A similar theme is also covered in “The Clan of the Cave Bear” by Jean Auel.
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