Evolution of Humans in 20 Minutes - Bilingual Subtitles
Asteroids.
Volcanoes.
A lack of oxygen.
These just some of the ways that life was almost snuffed out on our planet.
But against all odds, humans have managed to survive.
So how did we go from tiny molecules to taking over the entire planet?
world?
Well, we'll take you on a journey through time that explores the evolution of humans in 20 minutes.
Who the heck is Luca?
Is it Evolution's fault that we're all wearing braces?
And a minute, do we all really?
We the same great, great, great grandmother, four and a half billion years ago.
Four and a half billion years ago, something absolutely mind-blowing happened.
And I'm not talking about the Big Bang.
Believe it or not, this second act might be even wilder.
When about a biogenesis, the beginning of life from non-life, imagine a soup of ammonia, methane and hydrogen in a hot broth of water.
This could be cooking in a volcanic vent deep in the ocean.
Instead curry powder, Mother Earth probably added some salt.
sulfur, nickel, and iron to the broth, molten underneath and heated things up.
Over millions of years, these molecules clash together to form chains of amino acids like lysine, lactic acid, and urea.
These may have been the building blocks of life.
In the end.
In some of these chains started replicating, and voila, molecules replicating cells.
We now have life on Earth.
Okay, it's probably not that simple, but this was roughly how the very first single-celled
organism came to be, probably in a deep-sea hydrothermal vent.
Meet Luca, the last universal common ancestor, humans, animals, fungi, not so fungi, trees, we can all trace our existence back to this critter.
One of the countless differences between modern humans and our friend Luca here is that he was not self-conscious,
and while we We have tons of information on how we developed our big brains and started walking on two feet,
our leap to self-consciousness is still a little mysterious.
Let's take a moment to explore this a bit further because there are some pretty wild ideas out there.
Some philosophers have even proposed that the key that unlocked our self-consciousness was psychedelic mushrooms.
Yeah, the theory goes that our ability to use language, reflect ourselves, and
other unique human brain functions might all stem from ancient ancestors who consumed psilocybin mushrooms.
The psychedelic molecules within these mushrooms are known to de-pattern the brain, alter modes of perception, and...
encourage social bonding, which could be the perfect ingredients for the emergence of human consciousness.
And if you're doubting the power of these little psychedelic molecules, well all you need to do is look at how they're being used today.
One bio-pharmaceutical company called Cybin is using them to solve one of humanity's biggest problems.
Depression and anxiety.
Depression is a chronic illness that affects about 280 million people worldwide and it costs the global economy one trillion dollars each year in lost productivity.
Now, SIBON is developing safe and effective psychedelic-based therapies with top partners, creating scalable synthetic novel psychedelic molecules for inpatient depression treatment.
Instead of the bandage solution of anti-depressants,
which just numb the symptoms through daily use, Saibin offers a long-term fix in just a couple of doses.
This might sound like something from the future, but the company is already gaining traction.
They got the F-2.
FDA's breakthrough therapy designation, which a fast track for their drug development process.
This is the first known time the FDA has granted this status for a psychedelic-based therapy for major depressive disorder.
Saiban recently had no issue raising $150 million in capital,
and following a positive FDA meeting, They're set to launch phase three trials in the US and Europe, with all clinical supplies ready to go.
And Silla Saiben isn't the only powerful psychedelic.
Saiben has another exciting program in phase two for general anxiety disorder use
that's a novel DMT drug expected to offer a breakthrough in delivery time.
compared to existing drugs in the sector.
They're predicting about a 90 minute experience, which could really transform how many patients get through a therapy session per day.
You know,
it's pretty wild to think that the same psychedelics that are healing our minds today
may have played a key role in shaping them in the first place.
But we're getting a ahead of ourselves.
In order to be self-conscious, we need a brain first.
So get back to our timeline.
Three and a half billion years ago.
Before we humans can enter the scene, we need one very important thing, and that's oxygen.
Earth used to be full of nitrogen, hydrogen, water vapor, and carbonate.
dioxide.
It wasn't until cyanobacteria came along that we got the precious oxygen that we humans need.
One billion years ago.
Fast forward to one billion years ago when Earth was shifting around, creating different super continents.
You Rodina and then a couple of 100 million years later, another super connet, Panosha, formed near the South Pole.
This was also a time when single-celled organisms were starting to form into the first simple animals.
550 million years ago, 550 million years ago, 550 ago, one of the most critical events in our history took place, the Cambrian explosion.
This is when hundreds of different animals burst onto the evolutionary scene.
It was the building block for every major animal we know today, including you, 66 years ago.
The dinosaur.
It's ruled Earth for hundreds of millions of years and survived multiple extinctions, but all good things eventually come to an end.
66 million years ago, an enormous asteroid hit Earth, landing on the Yucatan Peninsula in today's Mexico.
It coughed up a ton of debris blocking the sun.
this finally wiped out the dinosaurs.
This might seem like an insignificant event for us humans,
but this extinction opened up this spot for mammals to become the leaders of the animal kingdom 40 million years ago.
These mammals included small furry ancestors of all primates.
The early primates were similar to the small rodents we see today.
They lived and multiplied in a unique ecological niche, eating an omnivorous diet of fruits and insects.
They continued to evolve and their brains grew bigger.
Without from the dinosaur, they were able to grow exponentially.
After millions of years of evolution, monkeys were seen in Africa, Asia, and South America.
Fast forward another several million years, and evolved.
Then orangutan lineage split off.
Soon would be our turn.
8 million years ago,
then, about 8 or 9 million years ago, human, a common ancestor to both chimpanzees and humans, split into two lines, chimpanzee and human.
For a long time, biologists thought this was a clean split that created separate chimpanzees.
and human species, but they were wrong.
The lines continued to mate and exchange genes for millions of years.
It may have taken a full four million years before the two species fully broke from each other.
Even today, though we're a different species, humans share an astonishing 98 to 90.
99% of our genes with chimps.
So 5 to 6 million years ago, the homogeneous became distinct.
Despite being a separate line, our ancestors were still pretty ape-like.
You may have heard of Lucy, a 3.2 million year old ancestor from Ethiopia.
Her brain was tiny, chimp-sized.
The secret to big brains had yet to be discovered.
And Lucy had long arms.
She'd probably spent a lot of time swinging in the trees at night.
But there was one important feature that separated early humans, including Lucy, from apes.
We were bipeds, walking on two legs.
What led to that?
Well, there are two explanations for what got humans worse.
The first is the savanna hypothesis.
According to this,
when forests retreated and savanna spread,
humans spent more time foraging among the grasses and walking upright allowed them to see better,
like an SUV that towers over all this at ants.
However, after studying chimps in western Tanzania, some scientists believe early humans
mostly walked upright in the This may have been to gather fruit in the upper branches,
or to escape predators, but this theory has got some explaining to do.
For instance, it can't explain why humans became bipeds, but chimps didn't.
Then how about them kangaroos?
2.6 million years ago.
About 2.6 million years ago, early humans started getting the hang of things.
Their brains began developing further, which allowed them to start making tools.
The species behind this was Homo habilis, sometimes known as handyman.
The early tools were only sharpened stones.
It took another million years for humans to make hand axes, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Scientists don't believe these early humans were fearless hunters.
scavengers eating leftovers from the kills of saber-toothed tigers.
They used their tools to cut up carcasses and break bones to get to the nutritious marrow.
If they got lucky, they ate zebras, elephants, rhinos, buffalo, and But they were just eating salad.
It's no surprise that early humans weren't all that fearless.
Life was dangerous to see some pretty gruesome deaths in the fossil record from one to two million years ago.
One adolescent was caught by a leopard and dragged up a tree.
A three-year-old was likely picked up by an eagle with its talons digging into the child's skull.
And, if it wasn't a leopard or an eagle, gum might get you.
One young kid got an infection after a baby tooth fell out and died of sepsis.
Scientists even found a woman who died of vitamin A poisoning.
I mean, she binged on animal liver.
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling pretty lucky.
lucky that I live in the present, 800,000 years ago.
Then, 800,000 years ago, early humans learned a new valuable skill.
Not only would this change the path of history, but it would give today's dentists something to do.
But, or in that in a second, humans learned to control the use of fire.
This meant we could keep ourselves warm, scare off breaders, and cook meat.
With humans eating more meat, this caused our most important organ to grow larger.
The brain.
But there was a downsize to all this new delicious cooked food.
It was now softer and more easier to eat.
This led to humans needing to chew less and our jaws becoming smaller.
And a smaller jaw means we were more likely to have crooked teeth due to crowding.
Take a look at this caveman's teeth.
Yeah, perfectly straight because of the larger jaw size.
100,000 years ago.
Okay, now that humans had fire and food, they were looking for a better form of shelter.
They didn't want to live in dark and dingy caves any longer.
They decided to start building houses.
Now, the oldest building we have a record of is from 400,000 years ago, located in Florida.
France.
This is also when Homo Heidelbergensis enters the picture.
They're a key extinct species of human that were ancestors to Homo sapiens, Denisovans and Neanderthals.
Between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago, a group of Homo Heidelbergensis moved from Africa to Eurasia.
One subgroup moved west to Europe, becoming Neanderthals, another moved east into Asia to become Denisovans.
A little later, we'll tell you about inter-species romance, so keep these players in mind.
Meanwhile, back in Africa, 300,000 years ago, a gradual evolution transition began from Homo Heidelbergensis to the first of our species, Homo sapiens.
In another 150,000 years, these archaic Homo sapiens further transitioned and evolved into the humans we know today.
Fossil evidence helps us to see a transition in the physical feature.
The size and shape of the forehead, the ridge, and the face changed over time.
Homo had a more prominent brow ridge and a projecting face.
Modern Homo sapiens skull was more rounded and bigger than they also developed a higher forehead.
200,000 years ago.
About 200,000 years ago, sometime in the middle of this transition from archaic to modern, a key female ancestor was born.
Scientists call her mitochondrial eve.
The DNA of each and every one of us tracks back to her.
Think of her as your great great great great great great great great grandmother.
Okay we've got fire shelter and a great grandma but life was still hard for early humans.
Anything could kill you.
Diseases fight over a giraffe carcass,
encounters with animals, In Africa, it was lions, or venomous snakes, and the Asian tropics, tigers, and in America's cougars and jaguars.
So the average life expectancy was only about 30 years.
The total number of humans on Earth was probably under 1 million, 74,000.
Then, 74,000 years ago, our fragile existence was threatened.
A super volcano erupted.
It a massive global climate disruption.
Africa experienced increasingly dry conditions.
Homo came close to being wiped out.
600 to 10,000 adults of reproductive age survived.
During difficult time,
humans seemed to have broken off into smaller isolated groups as the area became drier, river shrank, but this made aquatic life easier to catch.
So a while, humans ate more fish.
Ultimately, the fish may have been depleted, and was one of the likely reasons that they left Africa, 60,000 years ago.
About 60,000 years ago, modern humans began migrating out of Africa.
With waters receding, new travel routes might have become more accessible.
Humans first went to Asia.
By 45,000 years ago, they were settled in Indonesia, Haapao, New Guinea, and Australia.
Now, remember I said we'd tell you about romance with Denisovans?
Well, in Asia, Homo sapiens mated with Denisovan populations.
Denisovan DNA is three to six percent of the genome of specific Asian populations today.
40,000 years ago.
Now, around 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made it to Europe using two paths.
They got into eastern from Turkey and the Mediterranean coast was another route.
Here, homo sapiens mated with Neanderthals in Europe and acquired genes related to skin and hair growth from them.
Those cute freckles that you see?
That's from the Neanderthals.
Now around 15,000 years ago, homo sapiens went from Asia to North America.
But, wow.
Well, remember topography was different.
Though today's continents were in place, a piece of land formed a bridge between Asia and North America for 5,000 years.
It was called Beringia and it connected eastern Siberia to Alaska.
After making the trek to North America, some traveled down to South America.
Now, this was the point in time when all other homo species became extinct, leaving homo sapiens as the only remaining humans left.
We don't know exactly why this happened, but research suggests.
that it may have been due to us having better survival rates, or the other species were just out competed in some way.
12,000 years ago.
Then, 12,000 years ago, we reached a major turning point.
Humans to master farming.
They grew wild varieties of peas, lentils, and barley, and began herding goats and oxen.
The first farmers lived in the fertile crescent,
a region in the Middle East, but it wasn't just one group, multiple unrelated groups isolated from each other, all pursued farming around this time.
As you As humans farmers, population growth picked up.
By one AD, our population was about 170 million.
In the 14th century, we were hit by the bubonic plague.
It wiped out 50 million people of a worldwide population of just about 4 million.
$450 million.
It took two whole centuries for Europe's population to recover to three plague levels.
250 ago.
250 ago, the Industrial Revolution began.
How a world transformed from rural and agricultural to urban and industrialized.
Our population started to grow rapidly.
We one billion people in 1804 and in 2023 we were at eight billion.
Our growth has been exponential but humans have needed vast amounts of energy.
First we got this from coal and from oil and natural gas.
Now, we're on the path to harvesting solar power, discovering new technology and space travel.
Who knows what the future holds for humanity?
Maybe it's becoming a type one civilization, but that sounds like a story for another.
What if?
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