The First Great Awakening 70,000 years ago

Note: I attempt to use sapien to describe us and not human as there were other human species alive during this time. Using sapien should cut down on the confusion.

     No topic has fascinated me or captured my attention more than this. I have been a history buff since I was four or five but when it comes to pre-historic man and the Ice age periods it is an obsession. There are so many unanswered questions about our ancient history and how or why our ancestors got on the path that would eventually lead to us. I have read well over twenty books on ancient Man and evolution, I may not have a degree in it but I am confident enough to share and argue my facts with anyone. You see since Homo Sapiens had no written record that far back and there are few fossil records because the population was about 10,000 most if not all of the research ever done has been pure speculation. No one really knows how or why our ancestors began to think the way we do but all the evidence shows that it started 150,000 years after we modern humans first hit the scene in the Great Rift valley of Africa.

     Africa had a vastly different landscape 200,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens first showed up in the fossil records. Much of it was lush savannahs with plenty of lakes and streams, which in turn meant plenty of flora and fauna. We were not the only humans on the planet at this time either. To the North in what is now Europe a band of hearty, low browed muscle men called Neanderthals had been roaming the frozen countryside for over 300,000 years, the offspring of Homo Erectus, the first human to leave Africa and venture into Europe and Asia, that was about one million years ago. Erectus stayed in Europe and Asia, living side by side both Neanderthal and the Denisovans (another sub species of Erectus). While these humans found a way to survive the colder climates of the north Modern man, Homo Sapiens, which means wise man, was just starting to make a mark in east Africa. When we first came into the picture we were scavengers and foragers who lived in small family units. We stayed that way for 100,000 years, content with the life styles of scavengers but then something happened.

     It was at this time around 100,000 years ago when the climate began to change, drastically, as it would periodically over the next 100,000 years as well. This first major climate change turned the Sahara desert into the wasteland it is today, within a few hundred years the entire Northern part of Africa was an impenetrable desert, trapping our ancestors in Mid and South Africa. I should note that right at the time of change or just before a small band of modern humans had crossed the Sahara or made it to the Arabian peninsula by getting across the Mandeb straight which would have been much easier to cross since the sea levels were so low, however they did it these adventurous Homo sapiens made it all the way to Israel about 110,000 years ago. Fossils found in a cave near Schul verifies their journey and their ancestry. While this particular band did not survive, they were the first sapiens to leave Africa. We shift back now to the African continent thirty thousand years later and we find that Homo Sapiens are but extinct. The climate change was rough but they had found ways to adapt like sapiens always do but just when we were settling into our new lives a massive volcano eruption near Lake Toba in present day Indonesia caused massive chaos within the ecosystem of the entire world. Sapien populations dropped from twenty or so thousand mating ages individuals to about 1,000 in just a few generations. We were on the brink of extinction with hardly any place to go since they were literally trapped in Africa, there solution not only saved our species but more than likely propelled us into becoming who we are today.

     With no reliable hunting, scavenging or foraging areas in the interior of the continent our ancestors did the only thing they could, they fled to the coast lines of western and southern Africa. What they found was a virtual buffet of food and plants. The coastline was the most abundant area for flora or fauna Sapiens had ever come across. It was here in caves dotted along the African coast that about 1,000 Homo sapiens began the greatest leap forward of any species in history and it is their experiences in these coastal caves, the technology and spiritual advances and their eventual travels into Europe that I am going concentrate on in the next couple of installments. This era of modern man is the era that defined us, that made us who we are and that proved we could not only survive but thrive in any environment thrown at us.

     From humble beginnings as foragers and scavengers to the most dominant species on Earth in just 200,000 years, with a few very close calls to becoming extinct, our ancestors were truly remarkable individuals and I am honored to follow in their footsteps as a researcher in order to try to unlock all of their mysteries. I hope you will continue this journey with me in the next couple of days, it is a story that stands the test of time. My next post will dig deeper into the everyday lives of the sapiens who survived Toba and then thrived on the ocean’s coast. We will learn how the high-energy food like shellfish and other seafood helped kick our brains into overdrive and how our coastal ancestry gave rise to our religious and cultural evolution.  I really hope you guys will stick around because this is my all time favorite topic to write about and I have done years of research on the topic! So until next time Thank you all for reading and as always…..PEACE!!!!!!