The Fantastic World of Other Human Species

Hey, I'll bet you'll never guess this, but I am a giant nerd, and one of my favorite genres of, well, anything, is fantasy. From video games to books, the setting a fantasy world can explore fascinates me. One similar to our pre-modern history, but oppressive feudal life and disease are complemented by magic and whimsy. And a big factor in that whimsy is the fantasy genre's Elves, dwarves, and goblins are all essential fixtures throughout fantasy and make the genre that much more wondrous. Well, what if I told you such fictional settings are not as far off from reality as you think? Homo sapiens and our direct ancestors have not always been the only group of people. There have been numerous offshoots and genetic cousins who, in the long forgotten past, we shared our world with. Let's talk about our fellow human species, from the well-known to the obscure, and explore the prehistoric life they may have lived. First, let's start by breaking the rules a little bit, and go over not a human species per se, but a distant cousin. As the Homo genus first sprouted and migrated around ancient Earth, there was another bipedal primate who instead stayed in Africa. The Paranthropus genus, who lived about 3 to less than a million years ago in Sub-Saharan Africa, can be incorrectly written off as a relic. Known as the robust apes, the most distinguishing feature of Paranthropus is their strongly built lower jaw, and large molars and premolars. Similar to gorillas, they also sported a sagittal crest on the top of their skulls that supported strong jaw muscles. Indeed, these attributes helped them munch down on tough food. Mind you, we humans have the same adaptation to eat tough foods, although in time they have slowly faded away into a nuisance we call wisdom teeth. Along with this, Paranthropus had a cone-shaped rib cage akin to the quadrupedal apes, and robust is a bit misleading, the genus towering at about 1.2 meters, or 4 feet tall. Even with these ape-like traits, Paranthropus, like all organisms, were unique and successful animals, comparable to our own lineage. It's sometimes assumed their adaptations meant they fed purely on tough vegetation, but really Paranthropus was an opportunistic omnivore who had a very handy adaptation during harsh times when hard foods were all that remained. As for how they lived? Well, the knowledge on their lifestyle is almost all unknown, and most of what I'm going to say is speculative. The possible origin of the Homo and Paranthropus split is messy, but it's proposed a changing climate in southern Africa meant the early humans would begin to settle in the new open savannas, as Paranthropus would evolve in the retreating woodlands. As well, there is no evidence for the craft of tools like humans, but animal bones picked for certain jobs like digging are associated with Paranthropus. So, as our early ancestors, like Homo erectus, colonized the earth and made hand axes, it becomes easier to forget the humble Paranthropus, who stayed in the shrinking forests of Africa. So don't. Skipping ahead through human prehistory, the most famous of the extinct hominins are the Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalus. By this point, the predecessor of both theirs and our species, Homo erectus and later Homo heidelbergensis, had spread across Eurasia. From them, the other species of humans would evolve, adapting to the environment they had found themselves in. The Neanderthals were inhabiting the cold, barren lands of Europe and the Near East, and thus had bodies built for this harsh life. They were shorter and stockier on average than the humans of their own time, growing around 160 cm tall for males. A short and broad build helps in extreme cold, where limbs can remain heated by the body's core temperature. Homo sapiens in Africa had access to a year-round supply of edible fruits, a luxury not available to Neanderthals. Neanderthals did eat their fair share of plants, yet brutal winters would kill off this food source, leaving only the Ice Age beasts to be hunted. Their bones were sturdy, and Neanderthal skeletons show many signs of violent injury they then recovered from. Although commonly perceived as stupid, they weren't. Neanderthals actually had brain sizes equal to that of sapiens, and for most of the two species' shared history, their technology was comparable, if not in favor of Neanderthals. They were coordinated enough to hunt the humongous mammoths and woolly rhinoceros of the steppe. I've seen modern man unable to properly install televisions, so put some respect on the Neanderthals' name. Of course, if they were so well adapted for the very hardest of lives, how did they go extinct in the first place? Like many things in science, there's no one reason. Our technology would eventually push past that of the Neanderthals and give us a competitive edge. We had ranged hunting weapons such as the bow, and could create more well-crafted clothing with the sewing needle. For how hardy Neanderthals were, climate change and the extinction of their humongous prey may have been too much for their species to handle, and the last Neanderthals died out tens of thousands of years ago. Of course, one of the more interesting routes the last Neanderthals took were into the human gene pool. In essentially every region of Eurasia outside of Africa, you are bound to find some DNA in the human population, as our two species did in fact interbreed, meaning some of the Neanderthal population arguably didn't die out as much as they assimilated into Homo sapiens. Although confounded to the western half of Eurasia, other Neanderthal lichominans have been found in the eastern reaches of the Old World. Nestled in the mighty Alta Mountains, the Denisova Cave provided scientists with bones of several archaic humans, dated to tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand years in age. These are the Denisovans. Thought to have split from the ancestors of Neanderthals, the Denisovans spread across eastern Asia, possibly even further into the islands of Oceania. Very little is known of the Denisovans, although there is sufficient evidence they bred with the other human species. Various populations in modern-day Oceania have sprinklings of the Denisovan genetic code. And even one of the individuals found in the Denisova Cave have parents from two separate species, as her mother was a Neanderthal while her father was Denisovan. Another obscure Asian hominin is Homo lungi, meaning the Dragon Rivermen, or for short, the Dragonmen. The first fossil of this species, a complete cranium, was found in a riverbed by a Chinese laborer. He hid it for more than 80 years until it was eventually donated by his family to science. Homo lungi appears to be our closest relative, dethroning Neanderthals from that long-held position. Of course, you can never be too sure, so let's add a few asterisks to that and... Both of these species remain poorly understood, and hopefully future discoveries reveal more about their lifestyles. But for now, we can only wonder about the cave dwellers of the immense Altai Mountains and the Dragonmen of the Far East. Traveling back to Africa, less than 10 years ago, cavers stumbled upon hominin remains never before seen while exploring the rising star cave. What they found would later be described as yet another interesting offshoot in our genre's history, Homo naledi. Naledi was small, standing at 1.4 meters, or about 4 foot 9. As well, it possessed several traits from our earlier relatives that the more advanced hominins evolved out of. Their shoulder blades and clavicles suggest an animal not built for endurance running like later humans, but instead tree climbing behavior. For how seemingly primitive these tree dwellers were, they were also much smarter than at first glance. The brains were smaller than ours, but not any less complex. And maybe the most revealing of their true intelligence is where we found them. Deep, deep in a cave system. Now, usually we can toss this up to a few unlucky humans texting on their stone cell phones and not looking where they're going. Falling into caves or being eaten by a cave dweller aren't all that uncommon, but there's no obvious evidence of these demises on Naledi. No bite marks on the bones, obvious entrance to fall into, and no other animal remains who would have died the same way. This leads to an interesting conclusion. Someone put them there. Now, human burial is not a new concept, but before Naledi, only sapiens and Neanderthals were thought to be advanced enough to practice burying rituals. Now it seems Naledi can be added to this club as well. Of course, nothing is certain, but from what we can theorize about Naledi, we have yet another fascinating relative of ours. A type of human who stayed in the trees, and ventured down, maybe with torchlight, deep into caverns to bury their dead. Remember how I said the other species of humans are like the fantasy races of our fiction? Well, to top it off, here's a species of hominin literally described as hobbits. Homo floreensis, as their name gives away, lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until about 50,000 years ago. This is quite a long time ago from our perspective, but in fact Floreensis was one of the very last non-sapien human species left at that time. To give some context, Neanderthals went extinct just 10,000 years later. And for how recently they lived, they are some of the strangest of our relatives. The hobbits of Flores come in at a bit over a meter, or 3 feet, in height. The first fossil of the species was a 30 year old female, no taller than a chimpanzee, and a brain size the third of the size of sapiens. This shrunken brain raises an odd query about human evolution, which was usually shown as a linear path towards bigger brain size as time progressed. Yet Floreensis would have a brain half the size of its ancestor, Erectus, so how important was brain size to human evolution? It wasn't like Floreensis was stupid either, they used adorable child-sized stone tools, and possibly even fire. So maybe human brain evolution is less about the size, and more about how the brain operates. Of course, why was Homo Floreensis so small in the first place? It all has to do with their home of Flores. Islands force large animals to cope with fewer resources than the mainland, and thus Homo Floreensis is shrunken so as to not starve themselves. Meanwhile, nature's pipsqueaks get a size boost, as the mainland predators who keep them small and spry are not there to hunt them. This nature's trick room of sorts is called Foster's Rule, or sometimes just the Island Rule, and means Homo Floreensis was surrounded by equally strange-sized creatures. This is a real sentence about something that happened on Earth. The Hobbits of Flores, with their kitchen-places-sized spears, hunted miniature elephants, rodents of unusual size, and clashed with DRAGONS. Well, of the Komodo variety. But still, it sounds so preposterous, it's like I'm trying to have my official fact-teller on the internet certificate taken away. But no, that's just the incredible world of prehistory. So those are just some of the amazing humans who have been described. But there exists other relative of ours, so enigmatic and poorly understood, they are not given scientific names. The Red Deer Cave People are just one example of this. Discovered in China, the people were named after the large deer they seemingly hunted and cooked in their dwellings. They existed a recent 14,000 years ago, yet were said to share many archaic traits with ancestors who would have been long dead by that point. It was up for debate if they were a unique species or not, but a recent paper seems to settle them as just a population of sapiens, who are genetically affiliated to the modern East Asians and even early Native Americans, and not some long-lasting archaic relative. The most mysterious of the prehistoric humans, however, are ones that leave no fossils behind, just a genetic signature. They are known as ghost populations, groups of humans erased completely from our record except in the analysis of current populations. They are simply inferred to have existed, blank spaces in the genetic history of humanity so anthropologists can make sense of it all. For instance, a recent discovery was that some tribes of Native Amazonians are more closely related to the islanders of Papua New Guinea than to other Native Americans. Indeed, it seems some long-lost race from Eurasia crossed over the also-lost land of Beringia in order to spread through to the Americas. By principle, we know nothing of these ghost populations, but that doesn't have to be the case. Already, a genome from a 24,000-year-old individual was sequenced and appears to be a member of a ghost population that linked Native Americans with Western Eurasians. It is possible we can bring them back to the realm of memory. So there are some of our lost human relatives. Prehistoric man get a bad rap. Stupid, simple, and permanently clad in weird orange furs. But in truth, the people of the prehistoric world were a diverse range of people who evolved to suit their varied environments. Maybe there were no wizards, but the world of prehistoric man is just as intriguing as any written in fiction. I'm back! Sorry for the hiatus, but I'm glad I'm making videos again, and I've had this idea for a while. The artist of this fantastic background music for this video is Questmaster. Check out his stuff for this retro fantasy style of music. Of course, thanks to the images and videos I used to make this. Thank you for watching. See ya!