The Entire History of Humanity In 10 Minutes
From sharing the Earth with many other human species merely as hunter-gatherers trying to brave the elements, to building rockets, creating the internet, and now with our eyes set on Mars, the history of humanity is one that is sealed with determination, cooperation, and ingenuity. We have done so much more for ourselves than our ancestors could have ever imagined.
Today, humans dominate contemporary life on Earth, but we haven't always been this powerful. So how did we get here? What's our story? This is the entire history of humanity in 10 minutes.
Our story begins around 200,000 years ago with the emergence of our species, Homo sapiens. At the time, we shared our world with several other human species or hominins. The most well-known are Homo erectus, the upright man, and Homo neanderthalensis, commonly referred to as Neanderthals. The scientific consensus is that we all come from a common ancestor—the first spirits of the hominins that evolved approximately 2.5 million years ago.
The genes of these hominins suggest that they crossed paths and even occasionally interbred. Sadly, for the last 15,000 years, we've been the only human species to walk this Earth, which raises the question: what happened to the rest of us?
A scientific debate concerning the cause of extinction of all other hominin species is far from over. Some theories attribute their demise to rapid changes in local climate, while others lean towards a more aggressive explanation, with mass graves and cracked skulls found at archaeological sites as backup evidence. Another possibility is that they didn't go extinct at all but rather that we all merged into one species through interbreeding. Whatever the real course is, there's only one species of humans left today: Homo sapiens.
For many millennia, humans were just another link in the food chain—another stop in the circle of life—bipedal primates that were no more significant than other species participating in the ecosystem. So, what changed? What allowed us to become the only known species to successfully migrate and adapt to a wide variety of ecosystems across our planet?
Fundamentally, changed global climate and even ventured into space. This development didn't happen overnight; it took tens of thousands of years. What exactly transpired is something that we'll never know for sure, but historians have generally agreed on a few major landmarks in our prehistory that stand out above all others.
Striding bipedal locomotion was novel for primates roaming the prehistoric African savannah. But though it did free up early hominids' arms for other tasks, it didn't yet give them a significant edge over other species in their ecosystem for millions of years to come. What did forever change our place in the food chain, though, was the use of fire.
The first evidence for hominin interactions with one of the most destructive forces of nature dates back to around 1.5 million years ago. We started out by adding fuel to naturally occurring fires to keep them burning. It would take us around another million years for us to start creating fires on our own, which enabled its habitual use. Once we figured it out, everything changed.
The mastery of fire by hominin species was extremely useful for many different reasons. We used it to provide warmth when the weather went cold, light when the sky turned dark, protection against predators and insects, and best of all, we used it to cook our meals. But cooking food, Richard Wrangham posits in his cooking hypothesis, meant that our bodies required less energy for digestion, which allowed for more energy to be allocated to different functions of the brain.
This, Wrangham believes, is what eventually led to the development of complex language. According to Israeli scientist Yuval Noah Harari, though it wasn't only our fiery ways that set Homo sapiens apart from all other species; he believes there was something else—the cognitive revolution.
Around 70,000 years ago, we developed the capacity for large-scale collaboration through the ability to communicate complex information. The cause is uncertain—most likely a chance gene mutation—but the effect was unprecedented.