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What Happened Before History? Human Origins

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell · 24.4M views · 2016-06-23 · 9:39

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Overview

Kurzgesagt's animated overview of human origins and the vast prehistory before recorded history. It covers how modern humans emerged and spread.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it as a compact, well-sourced intro to human evolution that even led one viewer to read Sapiens.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2016–2022

Topics

Evolution & geneticsWorld history
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human evolutionprehistoryearly humanskurzgesagtanimation

What people said

doctoboggan · 2018-01 · Recommendation

It might not be what you were thinking, but the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt has 2 very good videos on the topic: [VIDEO] [LINK] His stuff is well sourced and generally reliable.

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joshbaptiste · 2016-08 · Recommendation

I live in a world where 90% of my friends and family believe that they came from the sins of a woman who decided to eat an apple. I recently read a book called Sapiens, this book really drilled into my mind that we homo-sapiens are a derivative of a single great ape that had two daughters, one that became the ancestor of all chimpanzees and the other all humans. If human origin interests you there is a great 10 minute video from the Youtube Kurzgesagt channel that lead me to read Sapiens. [VIDEO] [LINK]

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sillysaurusx · 2022-02 · Reference

It's possible. It's just one of those explanations that we'd really love to believe, since the alternative is so unthinkable. It's been a hobby of mine to be skeptical of it. Even Kurzgesagt mentioned in passing that we're not sure if it was due to "a series of minor genocides." - [VIDEO] - [LINK] If anyone knows of breadcrumbs to follow, please chime in. Genetic testing implies it should be possible to figure out how much interbreeding took place. We seem to be able to trace extinction events with some degree of accuracy, so it would be surprising if a genocide-type extinction event was easy to confuse with interbreeding.

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Sources

Video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, played through YouTube.

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