The Mystery Behind The Original Human
Who are we? Where did we come from? No matter if you believe in evolution, creation, or anything else, you’ve probably found yourself asking this throughout your life. In fact, many people find themselves asking them this on an almost daily basis—and that’s okay. They’re perhaps the best questions that have ever been posed. Even after 200,000 years of the human existence inhabiting planet earth, we’ve still only taken baby steps to get some sort of answer. In order to be able to gain insight into this, we must first locate the very first human. Maybe his or her skeleton can actually answer those questions for us.
Do we Know Anything About the First Human?
The first homo sapiens lived and thrived in the motherland, Africa. There is nowhere else on the planet that humans came from whatsoever. After a few centuries, humans began venturing out into the world, forming different types of civilizations, features, and languages—slowly evolving into the world you’ve come to know now. Modern science has been able to collect enough DNA evidence to conclude undoubtedly that from Africa, humans first went to China, then Australia, then Europe, North and South America, and finally—Polynesia.
The first human was undoubtedly a female, as females are required to naturally reproduce other human beings. Surprisingly enough, archaeology as of this year has been able to finally prove that.
Discovery of First Humanistic Fossil
In 1974, archaeologists were able to dig up a find that shapes the way we think about our history. In Africa, skeletal remains of a woman who scientists have named Lucy were excavated. Despite the fact that only about forty percent of her skeleton was able to located, what was found was somehow just enough. However, at only about three and a half feet tall and donning a skeletal structure that included both ape and human features, she was not quite a Homo Sapien. Her low and short forehead paired with her enormous jaw and incredulously wide cheekbones would have put her in the classification of Australopithecus Afarensis—or the species of human that existed about 100,000 years before the Homo Sapiens. She walked upright and had eerily human wisdom teeth, but she still possessed many of the apelike features such as a much smaller brain size and being covered completely in hair. She has been labeled the queen mother of all humans that we know today as she undoubtedly reproduced and therefore added to the evolution into homo sapien.
In 2017, however, archaeologists were in for another amazing surprise. While on a dig in Ethiopia, an upper jaw bone was discovered. Thanks to carbon dating, scientists were able to see that this particular jawbone was 2.3 million years old; making whoever it is incredulously older than Lucy, and pushing our ancestry as humans back by an entire 400,000 years! As this is still a developing story, the archaeological crew is hopeful to find other pieces of bone in the surrounding area, and because of only having a mere jawbone, they cannot name this species of human yet. Interestingly enough, though, is that this particular jaw appears to have been put to great use by consuming a diet that is believed to be almost entirely carnivorous. It also has the same humanoid wisdom teeth that Lucy had, but they are positioned slightly different.
As for the discovery of 200,000 year old homo sapiens—archaeologists have only found a few, and true to the story, each and every one of them were found throughout beautiful Africa. The fossils found were all female, and carbon dating proves that these are the original humans. They believe that these humans that were found were completely responsible for the creation of tools, weaponry, and especially an increase in efficiency of hunting. Based off of teeth analysis, their diet seemed to include more plants than the strict diet of just meat that their ancestors had. They were probably very hairy in the way one might envision a very hairy person today, but perhaps with a bit more thickness. More amazing facts that we’ve learned about our ancestors is that they most likely lived in open-air caves in tribes, were lightning fast runners, and were one of the first people to ever be totally conscious of themselves and their surroundings on a deeper level.
Conclusively, it goes without saying that humans are extraordinarily complex creatures. With this type of extensive background jammed into each and every one of our DNA, it’s no wonder as to why we’re as capable of so many intricate things as we are. It’s odd to think about the human existence in general in another 200,000 years. Who knows? You might be the fossil found at a futuristic archaeological dig!