I have always wondered why our species Homo sapiens, that evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago, seemed to do nothing special for the first 150,000 years. Because it is not until about 50,000 years ago that the first sign of creative thinking emerged with beautiful cave paintings found in Spain, France and Indonesia. Around the same time a new sub-species referred to as anatomically modern humans or Homo sapiens sapiens appears. Anatomically modern humans were more slender than their earlier ancestors; they had less hair, smaller skulls. They looked basically like us. But these changes weren’t just cosmetic. Two recent papers throw some light on how the revolutionary development of smaller and more fine-boned humans influenced the growth of cooperative culture, the birth of agriculture and human dominance of the planet.
The first is an analysis of the fossilized skulls of our ancestors during this transitional period, carried out ...
