The five million year odyssey
Peter Bellwood
Princeton University, $29.95
Archaeologist Peter Bellwood’s academic odyssey went from England to teaching posts halfway around the world, first in New Zealand and then in Australia. For more than 50 years, he has studied how humans settled on islands from Southeast Asia to Polynesia.
So it’s fitting that his new book, a plain English summary of what is known and not known about the evolution of humans and our ancestors, emphasizes movement. In the Five million year odysseyBellwood examines a parade of species in the human evolutionary family; he collectively refers to them as hominids, while some others (including science news) use the term hominids (Serial number: 09/15/21), and tracks their migrations over land and sea. It gathers evidence indicating that hominins on the move continually changed the direction of biological and cultural evolution.
Throughout his tour, Bellwood presents his own take on the issues in dispute. But when the available evidence leaves a debate unresolved, he says so. Consider the earliest hominids. Species at least 4.4 million years old or older whose hominid status is controversial, such as Ardipithecus ramidus, get a brief mention. Bellwood doesn’t deliver a verdict on whether those finds come from early hominins or ancient apes. Instead, he focuses on the African australopithecines, a collection of upright but partly ape-like species thought to have included populations that evolved into members of our own genus. Homo, about 2.5 million to 3 million years ago. Bellwood emphasizes the point that the making of stone tools by the last australopithecines, the first Homo groups or both contributed to the evolution of larger brains in our ancestors.
The action speeds up when Homo erectus he becomes the first known hominid to leave Africa, approximately 2 million years ago. Questions remain, Bellwood writes, about how many such migrations occurred and whether this human species reached distant islands like Flores in Indonesia, perhaps giving rise to small hominids called hobbits, or Homo floresiensis (Serial number: 03/30/16). what is clear is that H erectus groups traveled across mainland Asia and at least as far as the Indonesian island of Java.
Intercontinental migrations flourished after Homo sapiens It debuted about 300,000 years ago in Africa. bellwood greetings H. sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans as distinct species that interbred in certain parts of Asia and Europe. It suggests that Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago when they mated with members of larger groups. H. sapiens populations, leaving a genetic legacy in people today. But it does not address an opposing argument that different Homo populations at this time, including Neanderthals, were too closely related to have been separate species and that it was intermittent mating between these mobile groups that drove the evolution of modern humans (Serial number: 5/6/21).
Bellwood pays considerable attention to the rise of food production and domestication in Europe and Asia after about 9,000 years ago. It is based on a plot, derived from his 2004 book early farmers, that the expanding populations of early cultivators migrated to new lands in such large numbers that they extended the major language families with them. For example, farmers in what is now Turkey spread Indo-European languages across much of Europe sometime after about 8,000 years ago, Bellwood argues.
He rejects a recent alternative proposal, based on ancient DNA evidence, that Central Asian Yamnaya horse herders culture brought its Indo-European traditions and languages to Europe about 5,000 years ago (Serial Number: 11/15/17). Very few Yamnaya migrated to impose a new language on European communities, says Bellwood. Similarly, he argues, the ancient conquerors of Eurasia, from Alexander the Great to the Roman emperors, were unable to get speakers of regional languages to adopt the new ones spoken by their outnumbered military masters.
Bellwood completes his evolutionary odyssey with a reconstruction of how early agricultural populations spread across East Asia and beyond to Australia, a series of Pacific islands, and the Americas. Between 4,000 and 750 years ago, for example, marine farmers spread Austronesian languages from southern China and Taiwan to Madagascar in the west and Polynesia in the east. Precisely how they accomplished that remarkable feat remains an enigma.
Unfortunately, Bellwood does not weigh in on a recent archaeological argument that Ancient societies were more flexible and complex than was supposed. (Serial number: 9/11/21). On the plus side, his evolutionary odyssey is proceeding apace and, like our ancestors, he covers a lot of ground.
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