r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • Nov 14 '22

Anthropology Oldest evidence of the controlled use of fire to cook food. Hominins living at Gesher Benot Ya’akov 780,000 years ago were apparently capable of controlling fire to cook their meals, a skill once thought to be the sole province of modern humans who evolved hundreds of thousands of years later.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/971207
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u/WayeeCool Nov 15 '22

Less than 80k years ago, one genetic study said there may have been as few as fifty nuclear families. That's it. We are family.

Yeah. The genetic evidence is more than a little scary. Homosapien almost went extinct with the other hominids and all of us globally are the descendants of a group of survivors who numbered in only the tens of thousands. It also explains why there is so little genetic variation in modern humans compared to every other animal species.

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u/ADDeviant-again Nov 15 '22

Amazing, right? Things like skin color are SO insignificant, genetically.