Anthropology VIEWING GUIDE: video: The Journey of Man Dr Spencer Wells is head geneticist with The Genographic Project, Explorer-in-Residence with National Geographic, and professor at Cornell University. To give you some context, this video was produced in 2002 (it accompanied a book Wells wrote, The Journey of Man: a Genetic Odyssey). —So, when Wells refers to his embarking on these studies with Luca Cavalli-Sforza (“It’s only in the last decade that we’ve discovered how to read these stories”; “Ten years on, and we’re ready to re-write history”), that places the beginning of the project in the early 1990s. Wells has published a second book, Pandora’s Seed: the Unforeseen Cost of Civilization (2010), and a new video, but this older one is more useful for this course. TIME “Passage” àInstructor observation 02:20 “But  it’s  only  in  the  last  decade  that  we’ve  discovered  how  to  read  these  stories.”     02:55 à Field studies by Luca Cavalli-Sforza in the 1950s and 1970s: The studies he was doing back then involved taking samples of blood from individuals, and indirectly extrapolating genetic inheritance based on the blood proteins found in each sample. 05:25 “Ten  years  on,  and  we’re  ready  to  re-­write  history.”     à Cavalli-Sforza initiated this effort, using the genes of currently living individuals to open a window to past generations, in the early 1990s. This was shortly after the technology for breaking down an individual’s chromosomes into the component genes became perfected. The Human Genome Project (mapping the human genome; discovering the function of each gene) had already been initiated in the late 1980s by James D. Watson (co-“discoverer”, with Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, of the DNA molecule in the 1950s). 06:05 “Listen,  I’ll  be  honest  with  you.  I’ve  got  a  problem.  …  If  our  ancestors  made  the  journey  I  believe  they  did,   they  would  have  had  to  be  superhuman.”     à I (your intrepid instructor) “read” this as a bit of hyperbole inserted by the script writer, who felt bound to introduce a bit of (contrived) drama to ‘pull the viewers in’ before they started picking up their remotes. —What this contrived drama is referring to: “We” (anatomically and culturally modern humans) evidently emerged roughly 125,000 to 50,000 years ago (in the video, Wells and paleoanthropologist Richard Klein place the emergence between 72,000 and 50,000 years ago). The genetic evidence places their emergence in south-central Africa. However, the earliest archaeological sites attributable to these language-capable ancestors are found in Australia dating 40,000 years ago, with no sites in between. —So, like, they left Africa one day and made it to Australia by nightfall! —But even if our language-capable ancestors emerged as recently as 50,000 years ago, it would certainly be possible for a group to migrate out of Africa, and ov.

1. Anthropology
VIEWING GUIDE: video: The Journey of Man
Dr Spencer Wells is head geneticist with The Genographic
Project, Explorer-in-Residence with National
Geographic, and professor at Cornell University.
To give you some context, this video was produced in 2002 (it
accompanied a book Wells wrote, The
Journey of Man: a Genetic Odyssey). —So, when Wells refers
to his embarking on these studies with
Luca Cavalli-Sforza (“It’s only in the last decade that we’ve
discovered how to read these stories”;
“Ten years on, and we’re ready to re-write history”), that places
the beginning of the project in the
early 1990s. Wells has published a second book, Pandora’s
Seed: the Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
(2010), and a new video, but this older one is more useful for
this course.
02:20 “But it’s only in the last decade that we’ve
discovered how to read these stories.”
Cavalli-Sforza in the 1950s and
1970s: The studies he was doing back
then involved taking samples of blood from individuals, and
indirectly extrapolating genetic
inheritance based on the blood proteins found in each sample.

2. 05:25 “Ten years on, and we’re ready to re--write history.”
-Sforza initiated this effort, using the genes of
currently living individuals to open a
window to past generations, in the early 1990s. This was shortly
after the technology for breaking
down an individual’s chromosomes into the component genes
became perfected. The Human
Genome Project (mapping the human genome; discovering the
function of each gene) had already
been initiated in the late 1980s by James D. Watson (co-
“discoverer”, with Francis Crick,
Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, of the DNA molecule
in the 1950s).
06:05 “Listen, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve got a problem.
… If our ancestors made the journey I believe they did,
they would have had to be superhuman.”
inserted by the script writer, who
felt bound to introduce a bit of (contrived) drama to ‘pull the
viewers in’ before they started
picking up their remotes.
—What this contrived drama is referring to: “We” (anatomically
and culturally modern
humans) evidently emerged roughly 125,000 to 50,000 years
ago (in the video, Wells and
paleoanthropologist Richard Klein place the emergence between
72,000 and 50,000 years ago). The genetic evidence
places their emergence in south-central Africa. However, the
earliest archaeological sites
attributable to these language-capable ancestors are found in
Australia dating 40,000 years ago,

3. with no sites in between. —So, like, they left Africa one day
and made it to Australia by nightfall!
—But even if our language-capable ancestors emerged as
recently as 50,000 years ago, it would
certainly be possible for a group to migrate out of Africa, and
over generations, migrate across
southern Asia and into Australia in 10,000 years. A plausible
explanation for the fact that we
don’t find any archaeological trace of their migration is
embedded in the segment of Journey
featuring Julia Lee Thorp: during the Pleistocene, sea levels
were 300 feet lower than present due
to glaciation, so coastlines extended miles farther out than they
do today. The global drying that
took place exerted heavy environmental pressures on landlocked
plants and animals, “and their
populations cratered” (Richard Klein). But as Thorp points out,
ocean species were unaffected,
and would have been in great abundance. So during this time,
our language-capable ancestors
were arguably sticking to coastlines, where the food was. —
Which means their ancient campsites
are now under 350 feet of water. Also, lowered sea levels mean
rafting from the Sunda continental
shelf (Indonesia) to the Sahul continental shelf (Australia and
New Guinea) was do-able.
Anthropology
VIEWING GUIDE: video: The Journey of Man

4. 10:00 The San Bushmen.
You’ll be meeting the grandparents of these people in another
video during the traditional
societies portion of the course—when we draw on the
ethnographic record. As you’ll see in the
video, an important component of their culture is their unique
language family, Khoi-San, which
includes oral clicks and pops as part of their arsenal of
consonants.
They’ve evidently inhabited a large territory on the margins of
the Kalahari Desert (south-
central Africa) for untold generations. They (and plenty of other
societies worldwide) have
maintained their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life well into
the 20th Century. Over the last
30 years, however, most if not all San-speaking groups have
been forced out of their traditional
lands and way of life, and into lives of poverty on reservations,
as the governments of Namibia,
Botswana, and South Africa, along with international financing
agencies, see increased
agricultural production for global markets and petroleum
production as the priority.
★17:50 [Merritt Ruhlen, linguist (language classifications),
Stanford University]—the San family of languages
★18:35 [Richard Klein, evolutionary anthropologist, Stanford
University] “Speech is more than communication,
it’s the way you model your world. …”

5. ★19:30 [Klein]: “In every detectable archaeological respect,
meaning the manufacture of art, the widespread
use of materials like bone and ivory, and shell, burial of
the dead with ceremony and ritual;; in every
detectable archaeological respect, after 50,000 years ago
you see this burst of creativity. —There’s a big
difference in behavior. The form is fixed, and culture
‘takes off’.”
Paleoarchaeologists have known for decades that, after ca. 50
KYA, there’s a ‘sudden’ uptick
in the rate of technological innovation at H. sapiens sites
worldwide. The term they coined for
referencing this phenomenon is “The Great Leap Forward”, but
they’d been at a loss to
explain it. The lines of thought voiced by Ruhlen and Klein,
based on recent-ish findings in
Genetic anthropology and Linguistic anthropology, provides an
elegant explanation.
20:10
26:00
(Wells): “—So they didn’t use stone….”
[the scene in Die Kelders Cave with Royden Yates and
the worked stone flake spear points]
Spencer Wells makes it seem that, after 50,000 years ago,
nobody made weapons from stone
any more. Stone points remain into modern times. The real
point, here, is that one aspect that
distinguishes culturally modern humans is that they were more
likely to also use materials other
than stone in their technology mixes. (Also, that

6. conceptualization of more inventive
technological interventions for solving problems, innovation in
designs and execution strategies,
trajectories of technological development, all “took off” around
this time.)
★21:20 [Ruhlen]: “…get inside the mind of their prey.
Fifty thousand years ago, this would have given them an
immense advantage over their competitors (H.
neanderthalensis;; anatomically modern H. sapiens)….”
★22:58 [Ruhlen]: “Language is basically responsible for all
human behavior, whatever it is. … Language lets us
do an enormous number of different things, and hunting is
just one of them.”
25:10 [The scene in Die Kelders Cave, with Royden Yates]
The Mandible (lower jaw bone)…anatomically [chin] but not
yet culturally modern H.
sapiens.
★27:40 [Klein]: “It’s difficult to find archaeological sites
that dated between 60-- and 30 thousand years ago. …
—So few they have no archaeological visibility.”
Anthropology

7. VIEWING GUIDE: video: The Journey of Man
28:00 [Julia Lee Thorp, paleo climatologist (and more),
University of Oxford.]
foraminifera—small sea creatures (you
need a magnifying glass to see them in detail) that live in their
own tiny shells. The shells
survive in ocean deposition layers, which she cores, and then
analyzes the profiles. Analysis of
ratios of 18O (oxygen 18) to 16O isotopes in the shells
constitute a gauge for water temperatures at
the time they were alive: higher levels of 18O / lower levels of
16O indicate cooler water
conditions globally.
Age”): 72-50 kya.
-away, based on the evidence presented in the
video: humanity was on the verge of
extinction. Many small population groupings/societies of
anatomically modern humans existed
in Africa and elsewhere in the Old World (along with
Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo
floresiensis…possibly small groups of Homo heidelbergensis,
Homo antecessor). Recent
discoveries lead to the modelling that anatomically modern
humans and Neanderthals probably
possessed the capability for “speech” (involving sets of
standardized sound combinations that
could reference things in the ‘here and now’).

8. The Broca’s Area is the ‘word processor’ of our brains.
Language (spoken, signed, or written)
gives us the capability of referencing and communicating about
a) the past and future, b) plans,
strategies, tactics, ideas, thoughts, feelings—and have others
take these ephemerals that you’ve
communicated and append their own “takes” or additions.
By the current widely-accepted modeling: Among the
anatomically moderns, there was one
small population in south-central Africa. Some individual in
that population just happened to
acquire a genetic mutation on his Y-chromosome
(creation/acquisition of mutations occur randomly); or
perhaps more than one key mutation happened to enter the gene
pool of this population at about
the same time.
This individual/these individuals upon whom this/these
alteration/s were bestowed then
possessed the ability to generate and interpret language. During
his/their reproductive
life/lives, he/they passed [the mutation or complex of
mutations] on to individuals in subsequent
generations, who passed it on to more individuals in subsequent
generations….
Speculation: “Language able” individuals interbred at a high
rate, passing on the “language”
gene/s, so that over some number of generations, those with the
capability for speech and
language were ‘the only ones still standing’ in this one
population.
Among populations of hunter-gatherers, particularly in times of
food shortage, their territories

9. can expand, and can even ‘migrate’ some relatively small
distance. Additionally, it is common
that groups within a population of hunter-gatherers in these
circumstances will “fission off”—
leave their society of origin to establish themselves in other
territories. Often, finding suitable
unoccupied territory can carry a group some distance from the
original population. So, over a
multitude of generations, the descendants of this ‘ancestral’
population came to inhabit all
regions in the Old World, often out-competing/occasionally
interbreeding with populations of
anatomically modern Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis
that they encountered.
—So, this is one ‘elegant’ explanation for the genetic finding
that every person alive today
is a descendant of a single ancestral population. Initially, the
genetic and paleo
archaeological evidence suggested the “cultural modernization”
arose between 70,000 and
50,000 years ago. More recent paleo archaeological evidence
suggests that may have
occurred between 125,000 and 100,000 years ago.