Turkana Boy

The H. erectus Turkana Boy is a nearly complete set of 108 bones. He is about 63 in tall with hips and limbs that are much similar to that of the H. sapiens. These features signal the beginning of a major alteration in the bipedal locomotion. More specifically the curvatures of his spine, the orientation and balancing of hips, and the presence of a barrel-shaped rib cage like that of a modern human contrary to the funnel-shaped rib cage of apes indicate that the Turkana Boy was fully adapted to bipedal locomotion. The H. erectus had become completely dependent on terrestrial life by adopting to a modern stride. H. erectus lived a life on land and was no longer living in the trees. His overall size when compared to H. habilis indicates a large

A stone hand axe made of pink quartz nicknamed excalibur was found and is believed to be a sort of offering. This site showed that there was consciousness, planning, a human mind of sorts that understood symbolic behavior. Since they did have a cognitive ability what separates us from them. In the article A Natural History of the Human Mind: Tracing Evolutionary Changes in Brain and Cognition it talks about cognitive skills unique to great apes and homosapiens. These categories are self-awareness, gaze-following, physical and numerical cognition, social tolerance, theory of mind, imitation, shared symbols, teaching. While apes have the ability to execute some of these tasks only the modern human has mastered the art of them all. It seems that the understanding of all these traits and the process of application to the degree of a modern human is unattainable by every ancestor to the modern human and the great apes. Of all ancient humans the Neandertal was the closest to the modern human with a slightly larger brains. The discovery of a young boy Neandertal, around 100,000 years old, has helped scientist understand how fast children Neandertals grew up. New techniques of DNA sequencing and high powered computer rendering helped scientists discover how the young boy from Scladina grew up much quicker than the modern humans. The relationship between

Soon the FOXP2 gene was found and isolated as a key factor in speech. With this gene being in the Neandertal it is believed that they shared speech just like our H. Sapien ancestors. What this genetic research has found is that neither the Out-of-Africa model nor the Multiregional Continuity model adequately explains modern humans’ origins. While the Out-of-Africa model correctly accounts for the origin of modern human variation of H. sapiens a gene flow between Neandertals and modern H. sapiens did occur and Neandertals did contribute to the H. sapiens’ genetic pool. This evidence supports the theory that both models explain the emergence and evolution of the fully modern society we have today. Neandertals contributed to the genetic pool of today’s population leaving behind their adaptive legacy with the modern human. This contribution of DNA is a shared 1-4% of the Neandertal nuclear DNA which is an indication of a small but significant admixture. Given that Africans share no nuclear DNA with Neandertals it is clear that the genetic contribution of Neandertals to todays modern society happened between early modern Europeans and Neandertals after the H. sapiens left Africa. People outside of Africa today most likely have DNA that originated from