Hominidae

There’s a remote possibility that Hominidae migrated to earth from some other planet during ancient times. Another, more likely possibility is that, the evolution of Hominidae has been influenced by alien creatures.

Some ancient stories and the artificial structures that are only visible from the air, such as the Monkey, Spider and airport runways in South America are evidence, although not proof, that alien contact with Hominidae is ancient. One theory I’ve heard is that the stone age megaliths in South Africa are a result of alien gold mining activity (Tellinger, YouTube, 2014).

The most likely scenario is that life on earth, including Hominidae, is native to earth and aliens have been attracted to earth recently, because of the electromagnetic radiation, like radio and TV, etc., that we’ve been radiating and the electromagnetic pulses from nuclear explosions.

Advanced aliens would most likely look upon Hominidae as young children. I could be wrong, but I can’t imagine any aliens would be hostile. I don’t think we can achieve escape velocity, ie., interstellar transportation, as long as we’re motivated by selfish ambition and competing with each other.

They could think of us the same way we think of animals on this planet. Hopefully, they’ll treat us better than some of us treat animals. I figure any intelligent alien life will respect any spacefaring human civilization. Justice and compassion are universal values, not just human ones. We know that any aliens have the same God we do.

Earthlings

Forests are the lungs of earth. The abundant plant life inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. The respiration of earth’s forests is a vitally important impulse, influencing the chemistry of earth’s atmosphere. As the earth’s climate changes over time, forests expand and contract, just like our lungs do.

The most ancient hominin fossil discovered so far is a 7 million year old Sahelanthropus (Wiki), discovered in the central African nation of Chad. As the central African jungle contracts during climate change cycles, some regions become isolated from the main body of the jungle, just like the ponds left behind by the ocean during low tide.

The isolated regions sometimes, gradually contract and eventually disappear. Then, the population of creatures that originally evolved in the jungle, have to adapt to living on the savanna or be selected for extinction.

Another geological influence affecting the respiration of earth and its forests, involves the formation of the great rift in the continent of Africa, starting about 8 million years ago. As the rift forms, a series of mountain ranges and valleys are forming along with it, creating a rain shadow east of the rift.

As clouds rise to get over the mountains, they precipitate some of the moisture they contain. As they descend down the other side of the mountain, they retain any moisture they still contain, causing a rain shadow.

8 to 4 million years ago, the area around the Great Rift Valley was occupied by a hypothetical species of creatures called Sivapithecines (Leakey, 1991,1993). West of the rift, the great Congo jungle evolved and the Sivapithecines evolved into gorillas and chimpanzees.

The rain shadow, caused by the mountain ranges associated with the Great Rift Valley, has contributed to the jungle east of the rift evolving into savanna. As the jungle evolved into savanna, the Sivapithecines had to adapt to that ecosystem. In the process of adapting to their natural habitat, Sivapithecines gradually evolved into Australopithecines.

Instead of living in and around trees all the time, they had to walk long distances through tall grass. They needed to stand up, to look over the grass and see long distances, to watch for predators and for prey.

Their diet evolved along with their natural habitat. Instead of eating mostly the fruit of the trees they lived in, they also ate the grass and meat, as well as fruit, insects and tubers, etc. They also got into the habit of carrying stuff around with them and back to home base camps.

As the population of Hominidae increased around the Serengeti, the Australopithecines started spreading out, first into southern Africa and then throughout Africa. There are several clues, in both, our science of natural history and in our religious literature, that Ethiopia may be the original homeland in which Hominidae first began diverging away from the animal Kingdom.

Millions of years of adaptation to diverse ecosystems and the processes of natural selection resulted in the evolution of Hominidae, through a series of punctuated equilibrium, ie., long periods of stability punctuated by bursts of mass extinction and speciation, just like the bacteria evolving in the ocean and the migration of life out of the ocean onto land.

Driving around western North America, I’ve noticed that there are evergreen plants that range in size from small bushes to tall trees and every size in between, depending on the amount of rainfall in different regions.

The Hominidae evolving in Africa probably developed a similar pattern, with the Hominidae in eastern Africa gradually diverging from the Hominidae in southern Africa and vice versa.

The Hominin family tree is a very bushy bush. With many branches and genetic drift, punctuated by mass extinction and speciation. Australopithecines are the trunk of the tree.

The Australopithecines gradually evolved through a series of adaptations to a variety of local natural habitat, into a diverse assortment of the Homo genus of hominidae. Homo Habilis is the, “first Hominin known to have made stone tools” (S.A.1/09 p62). H. Ergaster is the first Hominin to migrate out of Africa, between one and two million years ago.

The Hominidae family of life has always been very diverse, with many species living, maybe not together in the same place, but certainly at the same time; kind of like deer, elk, and moose, different species of the same genus. And they have certainly been interbreeding with each other.

The first two kinds of technology hominidae discovered and developed were fire and stone tools. Gradually, Hominidae began to learn how to understand and follow the rules of nature, in order to use natural resources to extend their own physical abilities, and to add value to the natural resources, in the form of art and technology.

It’s actually a kind of cooperation. We don’t actually control nature. We cooperate with it, to lead or influence nature to accomplish more than we can all by ourselves. Very much like riding a horse. We can travel a lot faster and farther by developing a symbiotic relationship with a much more physically powerful animal.

The unintended consequences of going too far and trying to control nature, which is the same character defect as thinking you are more or less important than anyone else, instead of influencing nature by respecting and cooperating with it, are pollution and social and economic corruption. Selfish ambition is the dark side of human nature.

Wandering Out of Africa

When hominidae began migrating out of Africa, they first encounter the Levant, the fertile crescent that the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers irrigate. They most likely settled there for a while and then, as that land became increasingly crowded, some people wandered away, just like their ancestors who first migrated out of Africa.

Some of them crossed the Iranian Plateau into the Indian subcontinent, others went North into western Asia and eastern Europe and some went west into north Africa and southern Europe. Those who went east into India both settled India and then some of them eventually moved on into southeast Asia, Australia and China. The people who went north filled the land up and spread out to the east and the west.

All these peoples adapted to the natural habitat they lived in. They interacted with each other continuously, on the margins. Distinctive racial phenotypes evolved in response to hominin adaptation to a variety of flora, fauna and climate. Even the chemistry of the soil influences the creatures who live anywhere on earth. Some of the Indian people migrated on into Southeast Asia and some of them migrated on into China.

Peking Man and Java Man are 800,000 year old Homo Erectus fossils, discovered in the two most densely populated places on earth. I figure the Ancient Chinese people and the ancient Australian Aborigines and Papuans are the descendants of these two ancient Hominidae.

The Austroasiatic and Austronesian peoples, both migrating out of China, eventually replaced the Austropapuans, who had originally migrated into Southeast Asia from India, everywhere except Papua New Guinea and Australia. Mountainous Papua New Guinea apparently shielded the Papuans from the migrating Austronesians who eventually migrated all the way to Easter Island. (Diamond, 1997)

About 150,000 years ago, Homo Erectus had evolved into Homo Heidelbergensis. In Eurasia, Heidelbergensis evolved into Neanderthal Man. In Africa, Heidelbergensis evolved into Cro-Magnon Man. Cro-Magnon Man, Homo-Sapien Sapien, probably first diverged from the creatures around him in South Africa.

Once again, as the population increases, Cro-Magnon Man starts spreading out. Younger generations often go find new hunting grounds. Some stay home, some wander away. Another wave of Hominidae come pouring out of Africa.

The genetic and archaeological evidence indicates that Cro-Magnon Man first left Africa across the Bab el Mandeb, the strait between Djibouti and Yemen, about 60,000 years ago. They probably followed birds that they noticed were flying out to sea, or perhaps they noticed the smoke from a fire in Asia and built a raft and went to investigate. Or they may have walked across during an ice age, during which sea level would have been much lower.

That generation of human-kind had essentially the same sized brain as we do; so most likely, they could talk and reason in some primitive ways. The 150,000 years of evolution since the origin of mankind has enabled us to learn how to use our brains and our minds and develop a symbiotic, holistic relationship between our soul, our mind and body, and each other and our natural habitat.

I like meeting new people and exploring new places and things. Some of the ancient peoples of earth probably had that same novelty seeking gene, that instinct to explore the world and find new and interesting adventures.

So, the spreading of the human race was probably a continuous process that happened at about the rate human beings can walk; about 8 kilometers per hour. It was probably interrupted from time to time by barriers, such as mountains, deserts and oceans, but it was probably a continuous migration back and forth all across every land.

Those first human emigrants out of Africa, following that Great Rift Valley into Asia, most likely migrated north along the coast of the Red Sea and east along the south shore of the Arabian Peninsula. Just like the original hominin emigrants from Africa, the first really habitable land they encountered is the Levant, Mesopotamia, ie., Iraq, Syria, Turkey and the Zagros Mountains in Iran.

It was in the Levant that Cro-Magnon Man began to interact with and even interbreed with Archaic Homo Sapien Neanderthal. Neanderthal evolved in Eurasia about the same time Cro-Magnon Man evolved in Africa.

Today, every human being alive on earth, other than Africans, has about 2% Neanderthal DNA. Similarly, Homo Sapien didn’t just replace their Homo Erectus neighbors, they became one with them.

That’s why the oldest known hominin fossils outside of Africa, correspond with the most densely populated places on earth. Hominidae have been evolving there for hundreds of thousands of years. Chinese civilization probably evolved independently, about the same time the Proto-Indo-European cultures were radiating out from the Levant. The fact that they both built pyramids is evidence that they were not completely isolated from each other. They probably influenced each other.

Spreading north from the original homeland of the human race, in Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia, Cro-Magnon Man settled into the Nile river basin and filled it up. Eventually they discovered the land route across the Sinai Peninsula. They probably immigrated into the Levant for many generations before it started getting so crowded that some of the kids started migrating on to new hunting grounds.

They start emigrating in all directions, including back to Africa. The two main streams appear to have gone east into India and north into the west slope of the Himalaya Mountains and probably up along the Caspian Sea to the Ural Mountains and the Eurasian steppes.

Mountains usually supply plenty of food, water and shelter and are usually a more safe and comfortable place to live compared to the plains. I know that I would rather live in the mountains than the plains. Those ancient people were probably attracted to the mountains of Siberia and migrated from valley to valley, generation after generation.

On the other hand, Hominidae originally evolved in the grasslands of the savanna, so the steppe might be a more natural habitat for humankind than the mountains. I’ve lived in or near mountains for most of my life, so that seems natural to me. Mountainous terrain would definitely provide more protection from the weather and from other predators.

First Iran and then Ukraine seem to be the two centers from which the Proto-Indo-European people and culture radiate. Mesopotamia seems like the region the Arian people mixed with and interacted with the Semite people and cultures. The Sumerians and the Egyptians seem to be two distinct cultures that have evolved independently and eventually converged into one human race.

The Egyptians were polytheistic, with pharaohs who built forts, palaces and pyramids. The Sumerians invented private property, trade and capitalism. They built hospitals and universities, instead of pyramids. Egyptians and Sumerians captured slavic barbarians from the north to work as slaves. Monotheism arose in the Sumerian city of Ur.

Going way back in prehistoric times, many people had wandered from the area around Turkey, Iran and Mesopotamia into northeastern Europe and northwestern Asia. As that population grew, along with the populations in Iran and India, they all began filling out again and people started migrating into Southeast Asia from both India and the northern tribes coming down through China. The people always emigrate in all directions, looking for good hunting grounds.

These three clusters of people, the Iran, Europe and India became the Indo-European language group, the Scythians, Slavs, Saxons, Vikings, Celts, Persians and Dravidians and other Aryan tribes. The northern cluster became the Scythians; the Indian tribes became the Dravidians and eventually the Australian Aborigines.

Mongolians are most likely a mixture of northern Siberian people and the eastern tribes, who eventually evolve into the Han Chinese. The Han Chinese are probably a mixture of the Cro-Magnon people migrating in from the south and the Heidelbergensis people who had been evolving in that region for at least a million years.

Apparently, the Proto-Indo-European language contains words identifying plants and animals native to western and central Europe. The stories about, “waves of barbarians from the north,” invading Iran, the Great Wall of China and the fact that the Indo-European language group includes India’s Sanskrit, attest to the expansive wanderlust of the European race of people.

East-Asiana

I haven’t read any research about the genetics or anything else about the east Asian’s relationship to the Siberians, but the Great Wall of China is evidence that the east Asian people are more closely related to the southern people, migrating through India, both genetically and culturally.

The distinctive phenotype of the east Asian people and their distinctive style of writing indicates that they’ve been evolving in relative isolation from the other Cro-Magnon people, and probably mixing with the Homo Heidelbergensis present in that region for a long time.

The Northern tribes spread out to the south, east and west. Eventually they migrated as far as the Americas, from both the east and the west. We had figured out how to build rafts and travel across large bodies of water, at least ever since we crossed the Bab el Mandeb into Asia. They most likely came across to America by land and sea, from the east and the west, as soon as they reached the east and west coast of Eurasia.

The original American people were most likely from Europe. The Clovis technology, the most ancient archaeological evidence of human habitation in America, is very similar to the Salutrean technology of western Europe and not at all like the Siberian technology of the time. There are also genetic markers that radiate out from the east coast of the United States.

Apparently, the original Americans were selected for extinction by an impact event. There is a thick layer of sediment above and therefor after the Clovis technology and below or before the technology of the present Native Americans. In any case, after the end of the last ice age the Siberian people came down from Alaska and replaced the original American people.

It also seems odd that the Austronesian people who migrated from China to all the pacific islands, would stop their migration just short of reaching South America. I think people have been coming to America for a very long time, and from all directions.

I’ve heard that the original South Americans are most closely related to the Australian Aborigines. The few survivors are still living in Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America. The original North Americans are most closely related to the Salutreans from western Europe. The Siberians came later and replaced the original inhabitants, just like Cro-Magnon Man replaced Neanderthal Man in Eurasia and the Austronesians replaced the Austropapuans in most of southeast Asia.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that Filipina women look just like American Indian women. Fishermen blown out to sea could have survived and drifted along the ocean currents all the way to America. Even some of the people coming through Alaska, probably traveled along the coastline on rafts and boats.

The People of the North

Perhaps the ice age is what prompted the Siberians to migrate to America looking for warmer climates. In Siberia, the ice age glaciers filled the valleys and the mountain ranges remained exposed. Food would have been scarce in such a harsh climate and the people would have been on the move, to find more and better hunting grounds. About 30,000 years ago they began migrating into America.

About that same time, while the eastern Siberians were migrating into America, the western Siberians were migrating into Europe, moving into the region already occupied by the Archaic Homo-Sapiens Neanderthal. Cro-Magnon Man and Neanderthal Man lived in the same region for a while and then Neanderthal was selected for extinction, primarily because they could not adapt to the rapidly evolving climate.

Our ancestors, Cro-Magnon Man, may have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals, but we most likely did not cause it. In many places Neanderthal disappeared thousands of years before modern humans arrived. Interbreeding between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon probably happened rarely. Most modern people do have Neanderthal DNA in our genome.

The Great Wall of China is evidence of the magnitude of this migration of the Proto-Indo-European people throughout northern Eurasia and America. Even India’s Sanskrit is an Indo-European language. I’m not sure about the Iranian Avestan language. Avestan and Sanskrit seem to have evolved about the same time. One in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, west of the Afghan desert, the other in the Indian subcontinent, east of the desert.

The Proto-Indo-European people first migrated from Mesopotamia and Iran up into eastern Europe and western Siberia, starting at least 50,000 years ago, and then spreading out from there in all directions. One of the most significant advances that they accomplished was the domestication of horses. That enabled them to travel great distances and to over power the people they encountered along the way.

They influenced the Iranian and the Indian people quite a bit. The Himalaya Mountains protected the southeast Asian people. The Great Wall of China kept them out of China, at least until Genghis Khan united Russia, China and Iran into the biggest empire in history.

They also migrated west, into central and western Europe. The Halstatt culture was thriving in central Europe at about the same time imperial civilization was just getting started in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The original Britons followed the receding glaciers into Britain from Doggerland, which is now under the North Sea.

I figure that the evolution of Hominidae is similar to the evergreen trees out here in western North America, with gradual variations in size and shape, caused by the plants adapting to a variety of ecosystems. Human evolution is influenced by the relationships between all the people of earth and the variety of natural habitat that we’ve adapted to.

The migration of people and the flow of genes and culture, ideas and civilization back and forth between the steppes of northern Eurasia, Western Europe, India, China, Mesopotamia and Africa has been going on since… well, ever since Hominidae wandered out of Africa between one and two millions years ago.

One very significant prehistoric development is that, scientists investigating our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom have observed that Chimpanzees and Gorillas usually live in troops of several creatures, in order to improve their chance of survival. The troops are usually dominated by one or two alpha males.

Imperial People

Human nature has inherited this Darwinian survival of the fittest, winner takes all social structure, in the form of the “imperial pyramid,” with one Pharaoh owning everything and ruling everyone, and our modern military industrial complex, with one CEO and a lot of other people doing what the CEO says to do, how and when he says to do it.

Another, very significant prehistoric development, is the gradual enclosure of land into private property. People who plant crops want to be able to harvest the food they have cultivated. History begins when people start writing down records of trading their private property.

Like so many honorable ideas and institutions, private property is beginning to metastasize into the enclosure of ideas and knowledge, into exclusive rights and private property that we have to pay for. I realize that this is the information age and I do want to be a professional writer. I want to earn a living writing and telling stories. I don’t necessarily know what the best solution is.

I’m just very concerned about intellectual property rights. I think that this exclusive and oppressive intellectual monopoly is not right. Enclosing the truth into exclusive and monopolistic private property is a good idea growing out of control, just like cancer is a normal biological process growing out of control.

Other than instructions about prayer, writing a will and spreading your wealth around when you pass on, is one of the first instructions that Baha’u’llah reveals in His Most Holy Book, so private property is not necessarily a bad thing. Like anything else, its what you do with your private property that makes it helpful or harmful.

Going to extremes in anything is another harmful perversion of human nature and civilization. Don’t be fanatical about anything. Just be calm, gentle, steadfast, firm and compassionate. Be fair. Have compassion for yourself and everyone else. Have fun and be careful.

The Stone Age

The stone age lasted from about 3.4 million years ago until the end of the last ice age, when people started working with metal, about 9000 years ago and producing food, rather than just hunting and gathering food (Wiki/Stone Age).

The oldest known evidence of the use of stone tools discovered so far, was found in 2010 near Gona Ethiopia in the Awash River basin (Wiki/Stone Age). About 12,000 years ago, Gobekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, became the world’s first stone age megalithic structure. It includes 6 meter [20 ft] tall pillars that weigh up to 20 tons.

The two most common stone age structures are burial structures called dolmens and large stones placed in holes in the ground in such a way that allowed the huge stones to stand up on the edges or the ends of long boulders. The dolmens involve placing a large flat boulder on top of several boulders stood up in the ground so that they formed walls.

Often the megaliths, the large stones sticking up out of the ground, were arranged in circles, with quite elaborate and accurate astronomical alignments. The most interesting thing about the stone age megaliths is that there may be a global pattern, as well as the local patterns of each one of them.

The megaliths in South Africa are almost perfectly aligned with the Great Pyramids of Egypt. The Megaliths of Easter Island, Peru and the Great Pyramids in Egypt and Ankor Wat are all in a nearly straight line around the earth.

The line is the same length as the equator, but tilted 30 degrees. Some people claim that earth was hit by an asteroid and knocked off its axis and that is what caused the demise of the ancient civilization that built all the stone megaliths. Earth was called Atlantis back then.

The people who built these monuments obviously had a fairly advanced stone age technology and it appears they may have been communicating with each other over vast distances.

Some people suggest that the placement of the megaliths may correspond with vortexes in earth’s energy fields. It would be like the acupuncture points of earth. Earth has a very powerful field which could be a kind of Chi, just like the Chi in Tai Chi. The most obvious natural phenomena caused by that field, is the thunder and lightning of electrical storms. You could say that earth is nothing other than a dense concentration of zero point energy, the one unified field, or Chi or Qi.

Stone age people were evidently living much more in harmony with these natural phenomena and knew how to interact with the flow of earth’s Chi, in order to accomplish the first supernatural feats of construction. In Baalbek they were moving rocks the size of large trailer houses, 14x14x70 feet.

Human nature, by definition, is supernatural. We have sovereignty over nature. Its more like a partnership. We can manipulate nature by investigating, understanding and following the rules of nature to accomplish acts of creation.

Adding value to the natural resources around us is one of the distinctive features of civilized human nature. It’s a greatly amplified version of building nests. According to the archaeological record, we’ve been using tools and building more and more elaborate nests for about 3.4 million years now. And we’re getting better and better at it.

According to Wikipedia, extractive metallurgy started in modern day Serbia about 8000 years ago. Natural gold and other metals that could be found laying around had been used for 40,000 years, but processing rocks to extract the metal started about 8 or 9000 years ago. Mixing molten copper with molten tin or arsenic, to produce Bronze, is the beginning of the end of the stone age.