Pre-history: homo sapiens

Let’s jump a few thousand years and get to around 400,000 to 200,000 years before our time. This is when early homo sapiens (a variety known as Neanderthals…because of where their fossils were found, in Neander valley caves in Germany) eventually evolved in Africa as sons of homo erectus with bigger brains. With this bigger and more industrious brain and previous know-how of path to north-eastern Africa, they traveled away from harsher central African climate. First, they settled in north-east Africa of present day Ethiopia, Somalia, Aritrea and Djibouti. And, from there, using their now mastered skills of rafting crossed Red Sea to land on the coasts of Near East in Yemen. Straits of Red Sea separating Africa and Asia, known as Gate of Grief, is only 20 kms wide right now. 70,000 years ago when this historical event happened, lot of water was still trapped in snow from the Great Ice Age. So, the Gate of Grief could’ve been even narrower than 20 kms. Once this pass was established, humans (and, from now on I’m going to use this term exclusively for homo sapiens), traveled fast and happy along the coasts of Arabia and Persia to enter India around 50,000 years ago.

Humans were happy to arrive in India because they found abundance of water, flora, fauna and wildlife to sustain. Entering India from Iran and Pakistan into Gujarat, humans stayed west of Sindhu river and populated west coasts first, before finally crossing over to east side and spread northward reaching delta region Ganga-Brahmaputra in West Bengal. From there, they spread further into south-east Asia till they reached Australia around 46,000 years ago. During this period mainland Asia was still connected to islands off of coast of south-east Asia. And so was, New Guinea and Australia by narrow straits of land. By 40,000 years ago humans have formed camps in Europe, China and Japan. Americas were populated at the end.

By this time (30,000 to 24,000 years ago), Neanderthals became extinct from their last colonies in Iberian peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal) from increasing population pressure of modern humans (homo sapien sapien).

Pre-history: homo erectus

homo habilis species developed into homo erectus (= person who stands straight, who was around 5.5 feet tall) little more than 2 million years ago. Although they used same material, these early humans developed more sophisticated stone tools; especially evident from their biface (or two sided) stone tools that were ground on both sides. On the defensive side, a revolutionary development was that of building a controlled fire by 1.8 million years ago. This enabled homo erectus to come out of their caves and venture out in open. How? Because, other animals were, and are still afraid of fire. Other side-benefits of fire were: cooking food to sanitize, keeping warm in colder climate, providing light to draw those cave drawings.

Somewhat disputed, but interesting speculation is that these humans also developed rafts to travel over water. Whether they had help from these river or ocean-crossing rafts or not, homo erectus’s historical contribution is that they were the first human family members to leave African continent and venture into Eurasia around 1.2 million years ago. Cause for this migration was drying of African rain forests during the Great Ice Age (Pleistocene). They populated areas as far as France in Europe and Vietnam and China in Asia. Settling in frigid Europe, north Asia and Australia was tougher for this tropical hominids, but most of the Asian continent was welcoming to the new settlers.

With better social organization and technology of tools, homo erectus was hunting with better efficiency than homo habilis. In fact, attaining better efficiency in all skills acquired by their ancestors, was the single most achievement of homo erectus. Otherwise, from hominid development point of view, nothing much happened over a million year or so when homo erectus populated tropical earth.