BECOMING HUMAN (2009)

BECOMING HUMAN

http://www.becominghuman.org/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/becoming-human/
EXCERPTS.


Part.1 - First Steps
(Lucy, Selam, Toumai)

"More than six million years ago we took that first step to separate from the apes."

"And we now know that for million of years,

many different humanlike species lived together on the planet

until one day there was only us, homo sapiens."

"From the waist down, Lucy was like us.

From the waist up, she and her kind (Australopithicus) were all ape".

"Dan Lieberman is an expert on bipedalism.

He believes that walking on two legs evolved

because it saved energy."

GENETICALLY: "The dates that one almost always gets are around 5 to 7 million years ago

for when humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor."

"The scientists used to have a simple idea:

the growth of open grasslands forced our ancestors out of the trees.

They became bipeds, and in short order, Brain Size Increased."

"it takes nearly two decades for our brains to fully mature."

"brains of baby chimps are almost fully formed by age of 3."

"human evolution is nature's experiment with versatility.

we're not adapted to any one environment or climate, but to many.

we are creatures of climate change."

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Part. 2 - Birth of Humanity
(Turkana Boy - Homo Erectus)

"Homo Erectus pioneered what it means to be human,

colonizing whole continents and creating the first human societies."

"And here they are, the actual bones of a human ancestor

who lived over 1.5 million years ago.

It's the earliest human skeleton ever discovered.

The Leakeys called him Turkana Boy."

"The mystery of prolonged childhood is at the heart

of human evolution.

It may be related to brain size."

"We humans have the biggest brain in animal kingdom in relation to our body size."

"Modern brains consume 25% of our body's energy."

"Mark was surprised to find out that

the Human public louse are very different from the human head louse.

Somehow in the past, it (pubic louse) seems to have come from gorillas."

"the genetic dating technique known as the molecular clock.

it's based on the fact that the sequence of chemical bases

which make up DNA MUTATE AT A REGULAR RATE."

"On Flores, there were once pygmy elephants the size of cows."

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Part 3 - Last Human Standing
(Neanderthals, Homo Sapiens)

"For almost 400,000 years, the Neanderthals lived in Ice Age Europe.

Superb hunters, they had brains bigger than ours, and a record of survival twice as long."

Neanderthals lived 400,000 years, and by 25,000 years ago, they vanish from the fossil record."

"Ancient climate data shows tht around 140,000 years ago, most of tropical Africa became uninhabitable."

"All people on earth ae descended from a very small original population in Africa."

and they are 99.9% genetically similar!

"so DNA is revealing we share a common ancestor with the neanderthals.

This is Homo heidelbergensis... common ancestor of neanderthals and homo sapeins...

in Europe they evolved into the Neanderthals. in Africa, groups that had not yet migrated evolved into Homo sapiens."

(but) no eviddenc of interbreeding, it now seems more likely that as our population grew,

we simply pushed the Neanderthals out of their environments."

"Archaeologists have been able to track their movements by the extinctions of large animals.

In Europe and Asia, the arrival of homo sapiens coincides with the disappearance of the hairy mammoth, the cave lion and other large mammals.

In Australia, most animals weighing over 100 pounds vanish within a few thousand years of our arrival.

The Neanderthals were just one of many species that disappeared when we arrived."

(After vanishing the Neanderthals) "For the first time there was only one type of human on the planet."

"The ways in which cultural evolution and genetic evolution interact

will be at the forefront of the research of tomorrow."

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