What Drove Homo Erectus Out of Africa? (2021)(sapiens.org)
sapiens.org
What Drove Homo Erectus Out of Africa? (2021)
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/ubeidiya-homo-erectus/
11 comments
It’s funny, as someone with a child’s understanding of cavemen, I sneer when I read the question. “Isn’t it possible,” I think, “that as nomads, they simply wandered up out of there by accident?” I think any article on this topic should start with why that’s not possible, for the benefit of other children and cavemen like me!
Nomads did not traveled for the fun of it. They moved either because of business - buys stuff here, move over there and sell them. Or because of environment - the sheep have better environment here in summer and over there in winter. And places where we could stay all the time are already taken and they guard them, so we have to move.
When nomads find a place where they can settle stably, they overtime tend to stay.
When nomads find a place where they can settle stably, they overtime tend to stay.
Were they nomads? I'm not sure that there is too much evidence for that, is there?
Armchair answer: many things, probably including Homo Erectus itself.
Intra-species competition would also have been my first guess. Homo erectus seems to have been quite a successful species, given the archeological evidence. And given the time frame of the migration, I'm betting on a slow but steady expansion as the families and tribes grew larger and split to explore new territories.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was simple curiosity.
One mechanism that wasn't described in the article and for fairness I know little about when it comes to prehistoric hominids is the role of community splits forcing certain members to go out or die trying to establish hegemony.
I wouldn’t expect them to study that. This article is about second-order change in population density coinciding with the rate of environmental change.
If Homo Erectus had any similarity at all to us, then some young blood decided one summer to take a walkabout, for no reason.
Judging by last summer I spent in southern Russia, probably the deathly heat and lack of chilly summer mornings
TL;DR
Environmental changes, maybe.
Environmental changes, maybe.