The core idea of Darwin's theory of evolution is "natural selection", survival of the fittest, if the essence of this sentence is speculated from another perspective, the evolutionary history of living things may also be a history of extinction. Let's discuss today the truth full of cruel questions: Why do anthropologists mostly believe that the common ancestor of human beings is Homo Sapiens from the African continent, especially for us, the "ancestors" of Chinese are not Zhoukoudian people, Banpo people, and so on?
Before getting into the main topic, we may as well talk about an interesting historical background.
I'm afraid no one has not heard of the "Peking Skull", but there may be many friends who do not understand its significance for the study of human history. Before the skulls of the Peking people were unearthed in the winter of 1929, the mainstream view in the academic community was that the history of mankind was no more than 20,000 or 30,000 years old at most. And just these small skulls, the history of mankind with data to follow, has been pushed to 700,000 years ago. The Peking skull is undoubtedly priceless to archaeologists seeking historical truth, but in the process of research, they gradually realized that something didn't seem quite right.
At that time, the person who presided over the study of the Peking ape man was a foreigner, the German archaeologist Franz Weidenrich. He posed a seemingly naïve but frightening question: It is reasonable to say that a person has a head, two arms and two legs, why is it difficult for the Beijingers who have dug up today to have a ratio of limbs and skulls to skulls that are not close to 4:1, but even 2:1? Not only the Beijing people, but also the bones of ancient ape people unearthed almost everywhere in the world have this situation, is it really a coincidence?
In this regard, the academic community has launched a discussion, including some more realistic speculations: the ancient ape people were no different from wild beasts in the natural world at that time, and they could not escape the predation of beasts. Compared with hard, fleshy, round and slippery heads, beasts of prey are definitely more inclined to take away their torsos, limbs and other parts. Or after hundreds of thousands of years of erosion, the larger bones were washed away by the flood or simply corroded into slag, but the harder skulls remained—much like the principle of stone formation. From the perspective of human common sense alone, these speculations have their own merits and seem very convincing, but Weidenrich has proposed a cruel idea: the Peking Apes are likely to have been hunted, and the hunters have taken their heads and part of their torsos as booty after unloading and eating their limbs.
This statement sounds ridiculous, but Weidenrich gives his evidence. First of all, the most intuitive point: many of the unearthed skull fossils appear abnormal scars, the reason why they are called "abnormal" is because these scars are not the bite marks of the beast, but the rough impact wounds. The brow bone of one of the skulls was directly smashed through, and several other skulls had chisel cracks of varying degrees in the back of the head, the top of the head, and other parts. One of them is a very special skull, the entire facial part of which was smashed into a crushing fracture, and even the experts with exquisite techniques could not restore the facial bone. Obviously, beasts such as tigers and lions do not have this ability to act, so what kind of divine being can press a Beijing ape with a certain level of evolution to the ground and rub it? The biggest suspect is Homo sapiens.
According to the results of current research, Homo sapiens was first born 1.5 million years ago, and from about 300,000 years ago, early human society was gradually formed. In the process of development, Homo sapiens was able to make more complex tools than other ancient ape people, was able to hunt with more sophisticated means, and its primitive social organization was more closely organized, and even had a concept of life and death earlier than other animals and ancient ape people. In primitive times when the means of subsistence were extremely poor, the only means by which Homo sapiens could reproduce was to hunt and kill—to hunt and kill continuously. About 300,000 to 250,000 years ago, a group of African Homo sapiens began to try to get out of Africa, and they embarked on an unprecedented migration, extending their footprints along the coastline to the far end of Eurasia, continuing their populations at the expense of exterminating other species. Through the study of the Y chromosome, scholars speculate that Homo sapiens appeared on the East Asian continent as early as about 200,000 years ago. Of course, due to the limited age of research data, there are still large errors between the various versions of the research results in this regard, and many questions are still difficult to determine.
Let's take a look at the "achievements" of Homo sapiens in destroying this: about 50,000 years ago, the Australian continent was rich in aquatic grass, full of ancient kangaroos, thylacines, ancient monitor lizards, etc., like a paradise for animals. However, 5,000 years later, Homo sapiens discovered Australia and launched a brutal extinction. Eventually, 23 of the 24 genera of mainland Australia's native animals were destroyed. The Americas are not much better: About 12,000 years ago, Homo sapiens crossed the Bering Strait to reach the New World. Unlike Australia, there are more mega-beasts on the American continent, and some of these giant mammals are more ferocious than today's lions and tigers. As a result, these large predators, who stood at the top of the food chain, also did not escape the fate of being hanged by Homo sapiens, and 34 of the 47 genera of North American organisms alone were completely destroyed by Homo sapiens. Some biologists believe that from the birth of the earth to the present, more than 90% of the destruction of species is the masterpiece of Homo sapiens, and in this regard, modern humans are simply small and small.
Considering the "accumulated crimes" of Homo sapiens in other parts of the world, coupled with the horrific scars on the fossil skulls of Pekingese, combined with Weidenrich's "less than 4:1" question, a brutal history of extinction was staged: homo sapiens groped into northern China during their expedition to Eurasia, and they were surprised to find that there was also a group of ape-men with intelligence, upright walking, and skilled in making and using tools, with a relatively tight social organization.
Unfortunately, there is no room for two tigers in one mountain, Homo sapiens and Peking apes in the process of competing for survival resources, the evolution of the better Homo sapiens soon gained the upper hand, the defeated Peking people were used as food. About 200,000 years ago, the Peking ape man was basically extinct, and a part of the Homo sapiens who occupied the magpie's nest remained and continued to survive and evolve in this land, which may be the "mountaintop cave people" we know today. It is worth mentioning that the mountaintop cave people who are late Homo sapiens are very close to modern people in many ways, while the Peking people belong to the ancient ape people, and the two are not only not the same thing, but there is even reproductive isolation between them, which we will mention later.
In fact, in the process of Homo sapiens' expansion, it may not be the Beijingers who suffer the most, but the Neanderthals who were once flourishing. Compared to the "indigenous" Beijingers in the quiet corner, neanderthals have a much larger territory. About 120,000 years ago, they controlled all of Europe, west Asia, and northern Africa, and some scholars even believe that the "Xuchang people" who appeared in The Henan region of China about 100,000 years ago are likely to be a branch of the descendants of the Ni people.
Neanderthals were physically strong and good at hunting, and their society had a high level of development, and archaeologists even found objects similar to art ornaments in The relics of the Neanderthals. The view that Neanderthals went extinct because they were generally "stupid" is actually wrong. Humans or animals are not smart, and there is a very important measure of "brain volume". From the data, the brain volume of adult male tigers is about 300 ml, and the brain capacity of dogs that are said to have the IQ of three or four-year-old children will not exceed 400 ml at most, while primates such as gorillas and monkeys usually do not exceed 500 ml. The brain capacity of erect apes such as Peking man and Javan ape man is between 800 and 1000 ml, while the brain capacity of Homo sapiens is between 1400 and 1600 ml, and modern people are generally not less than 1500 ml, and the gap can be seen.
Although on the whole, neanderthals may not be as good as Homo sapiens, but it is not too bad, and even some Neanderthal brains have a capacity of up to 1700 ml. Physiologically, Neanderthals can achieve hybridization with Homo sapiens, and there is no reproductive isolation between the two, which also shows the advanced nature of Nighur evolution. However, it is such a "developed" kind of human being that encountered rapidly expanding Homo sapiens about 55,000 years ago and fell behind after several rounds of confrontation. The traditional living space of the Nepalese people is severely oppressed and cannot be transferred to other regions. As a result, about 40,000 years ago, as the world's climate deteriorated, Neanderthals rapidly became extinct.
Of course, the academic community has not yet settled on the issue of the extinction of the Nepalese people, and strictly speaking, this is also an unsolved problem in human history. However, in reverse, the races in different parts of the world are not the same, and even in a big country like China, there are some differences in the appearance of people in the south and the north, not to mention the white Europeans and Americans and black Africans, but why do most scholars now think that all human beings are one species and have a common ancestor? One of the most important reasons is the "reproductive isolation" we just mentioned.
Literature shows that in the 1920s, there was a well-known academic tycoon in the Soviet Union named Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov. This gentleman is famous because he has done many things that normal people dare not do or even think about, such as hard-matching different species. Ivanov successfully cultivated the "zebra donkey", that is, to create zebras and the descendants of donkeys. After tasting the sweetness, he actually wanted to have people and chimpanzees hybridize. Of course, it was precisely because of the strong reproductive isolation between humans and primates that Ivanov ultimately failed. From this point of view, the urban legends about what "people and XX hybridize to produce what things" are not credible at all.
In fact, human beings, strictly speaking, human beings (i.e., us) that have survived to this day are not "unique", but one of the 17 species under the genus of the whole person. The mainstream view of the academic community believes that in the long process of "natural selection", the other 16 species of human beings are either naturally eliminated or slaughtered by other humans. By chance, homo sapiens, who evolved better and more ruthlessly in the same era, overcame all difficulties and competitors, and eventually continue to this day. In the long process of development, affected by natural conditions, humans distributed in different parts of the world have made their own evolutions in order to better adapt to the environment, forming what we know today.
For a long time, human ancestors were no different from beasts, and hunting and survival were the only concerns they had. As we said at the beginning of the article, the essence of the so-called "survival of the fittest" is a brutal extinction, and only if it is strong enough to stand to the end – perhaps in today's society, this has not changed. By contrast, hypotheses such as "racial integration" are probably just beautiful ideas of scholars full of romanticism.