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The history of humanity encompasses the period from around 300,000 BCE to the present day. The first humans lived collectively in classless groups of 30 to 40 members who adopted a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They originally lived in the Southern region of Africa, but spread to other regions around 85,000 years ago, mainly due to changing climate conditions. The whole human population of Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas are descendants of a single group of hunter-gatherers who left Africa around that time,[1] but all humans descend from a single mother who lived as far as 120,000 to 197,000 years ago.[2]
Humans throughout this period developed many lifestyles and modes of production, such as primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism and socialism.
Pre-literary history
Before the speciation process that led to the evolution of humans, the primate species Australopithecus afarensis that lived 3,2 million years ago was distinct from other apes because it walked upright. This had revolutionary implications because bipedalism meant the hands and arms were free to develop tools. The tool-making behavior would flourish in the descendant human species Homo habilis, who lived around 1,6 million to 2,3 million years ago.[1]
Up to 99% of their history, humans lived cooperatively in small-scale classless groups, similar to currently existing hunter-gatherers societies. Selflessness, reciprocity and cooperation is a common behavior of hunter-gatherers in every continent, regardless of their environment.[3]
Settlement in the Americas
Human settlement in the Americas began between 12,500 to 27,000 years ago through different possible routes recognized by researchers. The most common and accepted theory is that humans crossed through land between Siberia and Alaska in the Beringia region at least 30,000 years ago,[4][5] when the sea levels were at a minimum, revealing a pathway which made possible to cross between the lands, and stayed there until at least 12,500 years ago,[6] when they went deep into American land.
Genetic evidence based on mitochondrial DNA suggests that the last common ancestor between central Asian and North American indigenous peoples was estimated to have diverged between 25,000 to 20,000 years ago,[7] during the time humans were located at the Beringian region, and subhaplogroup analysis suggest that dispersion from Beringia may have occurred as early as 16,000 years ago.[8]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Neil Faulkner (2013). 'Hunters and farmers' in A Marxist history of the world – from neanderthals to neoliberals. Pluto Press. ISBN 9780745332154 [LG]
- ↑ Qiaomei Fu, Alissa Mittnik, et al. (2013). A revised timescale for human evolution based on ancient mitochondrial genomes. Current Biology, vol. 23.
- ↑ Chris Harman (1999). 'The rise of class societies' in A people's history of the world. ISBN 9781898876557 [LG]
- ↑ “The port of entry for America’s first peoples was the Bering Sea region. They could, and likely did, walk across from Siberia to Alaska when expanding continental ice sheets dropped sea levels worldwide and Beringia surfaced. Crossing its Mammoth Steppe, blanketed by parkland and grazed by mammoth, horse, and bison, was possible anytime between 27,000 and 10,000 years ago. The recent genetic evidence of a possible Beringian standstill suggests the first peoples may have been relatively isolated in this region for much of that time.”
David J. Meltzer (2009). First peoples in a New World: colonizing Ice Age America (p. 329). University of California Press. - ↑ “The new data suggest that the initial founders of the Americas emerged from a single source ancestral population that evolved in isolation, likely in Beringia. This scenario is consistent with the unique pattern of diversity from autosomal locus D9S1120 of a private allele in high frequency and ubiquitous in the Americas. The finding that humans were present at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site dated to 30,000 ybp suggests that the isolation in Beringia might have lasted up to 15,000 years. Following this isolation, the initial founders of the Americas began rapidly populating the New World from North to South America.”
Erika Tamm, et al (2007). Beringian Standstill and spread of Native American founders. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000829 [HUB] - ↑ “In any case, it appears from the evidence at Monte Verde that the first Americans were here by at least 12,500 BP and possibly earlier still. Certainly by 11,500 BP, Clovis Paleoindians were widespread, possibly representing a second migratory pulse to the New World, one that may have spread across the continent in less than a thousand years.”
David J. Meltzer (2009). First peoples in a New World: colonizing Ice Age America (p. 329). University of California Press. - ↑ “Establishing when central Asian and Native American haplogroup lineages last shared a common ancestor has proven to be difficult. Current coalescent estimates based on variation in extant mtDNA lineages set the event at 25 to 20 ka or less than 20 ka, after the last glacial maximum (LGM), and estimates based on Y- chromosome variability suggest that divergence occurred after 22.5 ka, possibly as late as 20 to 15 ka.”
Goebel, Waters & O’Rourke (2008). The Late Pleistocene dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas. doi: 10.1126/science.1153569 [HUB] - ↑ “New analyses of haplogroup subclades help to resolve when modern humans subsequently spread from Beringia to the rest of the Americas. Three subclades of mtDNA subhaplogroup C1 are widely distributed among North, Central, and South Americans but absent in Asian populations, which suggests that they evolved after the central Asian–Native American split, as the first Americans were dispersing from Beringia. The estimated date of coalescence for these subclades is 16.6 to 11.2 ka, which suggests that the colonization of the Americas south of the continental ice sheets may have occurred some time during the late-glacial period, thousands of years after the initial splitting of Asian and Native American lineages.”
Goebel, Waters & O’Rourke (2008). The Late Pleistocene dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas.. doi: 10.1126/science.1153569 [HUB]