2012: What do we know about humanity?

2012 has officially closed with countless scientific discoveries that help us - people are better about their own species.

People are not alone

A series of discoveries in the past year revealed the extinct relatives of modern people. For example, researchers have unearthed 3.4-million-year-old fossils of an unknown species so far, living at the same time and location with the original human ape Australopithecus afarensis, which was The most likely is the ancestors of modern people. In addition, fossils dating back from 1.78 to 1.95 million years were discovered in 2007 and 2009 in northern Kenya, showing that at least two species of extinct people have existed in parallel. with Homo erectus, the direct ancestor of humankind. Moreover, fossils from 11,500 - 14,500 years old refer to an unmatched strain of people called 'The Red Deer Cave' who grew up in China.

Neanderthals are a branch in primate development, including
human.This is also one of our extinct relatives.

Bone is not the only thing scientists can base on discoveries of extinct human relatives in 2012. For example, scientists finally found the face of a breed. imaginative, 'eating at the hole' as in the work of British writer JRR Tolkien in 1973. Anthropologist Susan Hayes from Wollongong University in Australia has recreated the face of a 30-year-old female high. 1 meter of the extinct breed, officially called Homo floresiensis . This breed was first discovered on the remote island of Flores in Indonesia in 2003.

Test results of the recently discovered, extinct, extinct Denisovan breed and a close relative of the Neanderthal prehistoric people, also reveal new details about the community each 'race-loving relationship' with this modern person. The deciphered Denisovan genome belongs to a girl with dark skin, brown hair and brown eyes. When comparing genomes, the researchers found that there have been about 100,000 recent changes in our genome since the separation with Denisovans. Large numbers of these changes have affected genes involved in brain function and the development of the nervous system, leading to speculation that modern humans may think differently than Denisovans.

The results of the gene analysis also show that the only modern community with ancestors did not do it all to Neanderthals who are African residents in sub-Saharan Africa.

The discoveries are just a part of the extinct relatives of modern people unveiled in 2012. Last year also noted a number of new findings, for example, scientists found wings The unusually strong right hand of the Neanderthals may not be due to the hunting life associated with the spear as previously conjectured, but because of the frequent cuts of animal skin to make clothes and hideouts. Archaeologists also surmised that Neanderthals and other extinct humans could be prehistoric sailors, venturing into Mediterranean islands for millennia before the time when modern humans had You can set foot there.

The use of human tools

The prehistoric artifacts published in 2012 have helped us better understand how the use of tools has helped humanity reshape the world, and perhaps also inadvertently affects the development of humanity itself. For example, ashes and bones are burned, the oldest evidence of controlled use of fire reveals that human ancestors may have used fire from a million years ago, 300,000 years earlier than conjectured. before. Controlled fire and cooked meat may have affected human brain development, allowing our ancestors to evolve to have larger brains and bodies, consuming more calories.

Findings related to prehistoric weapons also show that people have learned to build and use these tools earlier than previous scientific circles. For example, stone arrows or ancient damage tools are proof of how people have refined sophisticated weapons about 70,000 years ago, while a group of anthropological experts headed by the University of Toronto has found evidence of South African residents using stone-headed weapons to hunt 500,000 years ago, 200,000 years earlier than conjectured.

Even the discovery in the past year about the first direct signs of cheese making from 7,500-year-old connoisseurs in Poland could help reveal, how animal milk has shaped European genetics. how big. Most prehistoric world inhabitants, including modern European ancestors, are lactose intolerant, unable to digest lactose in milk sugar as adults today. However, despite being a dairy product, cheese contains relatively low lactose content. The transformation of milk into a product like cheese, more easily absorbed for those who are lactose intolerant, can help promote the development of dairy technology in the first European farmers. The presence of dairy-making activity for generations, may then have set the stage for the evolution of lactose tolerance in Europe. Thus, cheese can play a role in changing the digestibility of Western residents.

Other evidence related to the diet of our prehistoric relatives was also gradually revealed. For example, 2 million-year-old fossils show that a direct human ancestor may have survived through a forest-bound diet, including leaves, fruits and bark, instead of a real one. The application is based on a grass-free grassland like that of extinct human relatives. In addition, a 1.5 million-year-old skull fragment of a child discovered recently in Tanzania implies that their later members eat meat regularly - a trait that helps explain why humans are there is a bigger evolutionary brain.

People are still evolving

Considering the future of humanity, research in 2012 added evidence of the natural dynamics of evolution continuing to shape humanity. The church records of nearly 6,000 Finns born between 1760 and 1849 show that, although people have completely changed their living environment by activities such as agriculture, forms of existence and birth Human production is still equivalent to other species.

A researcher at Stanford University even points out that people are getting more and more stupid over time, because there is no longer evolutionary pressure that forces them to be smarter, more clever than when we started living in the crowded population population many millennia ago. However, many other scholars have rejected this view, citing the case of geniuses like physicist Stephen Hawking and said, instead of losing intelligence, people have diversified, leading to many types of smart, cleverly different like today.