re: #20 jamesfirecat

Dear god this is was like, PHYSICALLY PAINFUL for me to watch all the way through, but I just had to do it.

By the way the kid has it backward [snip]

We don’t know where life started, but it wasn’t in the middle east. There wasn’t any such thing or place when life started. The continents themselves are wave tossed bits of foam, not permanent objects, on the time scale of life on earth.

As to our own species, we are quite recent. We are also evolving fairly rapidly. It almost never happens that a new species arises suddenly, with a single mutation. Mostly, you just have populations that become reproductively separated and that find themselves in different environments, and the selective pressures of their environments carry them down different paths from there.

For a time, they remain the same species—-they are willing and able to breed with each other, should opportunity arise. But little by little, the differences grow and the willingness and/or ability fades away.

The earliest time that we find fossils of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans is a mere 50 to 100 thousand years ago. Islands come and go on that time span, as the seas rise and fall. But the continents were then where they are now, give or take a few feet.

Our species originated in Africa. We are all Africans*, if we trace our ancestry back far enough.

*(98% African, at any rate. Most of us, apart from those of pure African heritage, have some small admixture of Neanderthal background. Life, as a famous movie once noted, finds a way.)