When I say hominid are the great apes whereas you're a hominin i should have said humans are hominids but not all great apes are hominins But I didnt say that did I? No. But here we are asking for support regardless: www.patreon.com/rareearth ko-fi.com/rareearth

@jamesglenn4151

Ай бұрын

hahaha glad you beat me to it! keep it frosty mate loved your content for years!

@RareEarthSeries

Ай бұрын

@@xp8969 the audio is just directly cut from me talking into the mic - I don't hear any major issues in the edit, certainly not ones that leave the video unwatchable

@disky01

Ай бұрын

​@RareEarthSeries Bro, my guy, my dude. You're fine.

@5t4n5

Ай бұрын

@@xp8969 You need some decent speakers for your computer, and a decent computer, because the sound was perfectly ok to listen to, i heard every word perfectly ok.

@DIREWOLFx75

Ай бұрын

"other creatures got here, so why not they?" Thank goodness that there's SOMEONE who actually looks at evidence instead of just trying to disprove anything that doesn't fit the currently accepted dogma. Because yes, no need for SAILING(why not rowing? paddling?) to get there. Lots of species got across waters without any connecting lands. It as a completely worthless argument. "is it really that much of a stretch" Nope. It is in fact VERY plausible that pre-humans figured out how to get across waters with the help of something floating. And as you said, how did monkeys get to S.America? That's MUCH longer and on an ocean that have much more dangerous weather. When it comes to archeology, there is one horribly big issue with the official science. That they tend to treat anything that has not been PROVEN without any doubt to have happened, is completely impossible until proven otherwise. It's terribly annoying. Anyone who cannot look at something new with an unprejudiced mind has already failed as a scientist, because science is looking at all evidence and trying to figure out what it means, not making assumptions to fit the evidence into. Evidence does not stop being evidence just because we find it implausible to be possible. The migration of humans to Americas is an excellent example of this. Until recently every piece of evidence pointing towards migration there before a landbridge existed, was dismissed, often outright casually and arrogantly. And yet now, the last decade of findings have pretty much provided close to rocksolid evidence of migration happening before the landbridge could possibly have existed. And now the accepted narrative is changing towards likewise instead rejecting that the less solid evidence of even earlier migrations could possibly be true. And yet most of that evidence is now at the same level of validity that the previously discarded evidence was a few decades ago. And always always, the single biggest problem is the assumption of primitivism. Assumptions that has been disproven literally thousands upon thousands of times, and yet we STILL keep going with the bad logic of "less technology and ancient=inferior ability to think or invent". Also the fallacy of equating knowledge with intelligence. Ancient pre-humans would also have their geniuses, the lower populations means they would be fewer and further between, but there's no reason to assume that someone with the mental abilities of Da Vinci didn't exist a few million years ago. They would have had vastly inferior resources to build upon of course, but the most likely problems and questions they would have tried to solve would also generally be dramatically less complex and not require nearly as much nonlocal resources. All you need for a raft is the very primitive toolmaking of very early pre-humans, and basically seeing something float in water. And realising that something hollow floats better, is a very easy next step. So yes, rafts and primitive canoes is pretty much guaranteed to have existed for millions of years. And possibly one of the single most reinvented technologies in history.

Just a heads up, hippos can't swim (they just run on the ground underwater), so how they got there is even more amazing.

@RareEarthSeries

Ай бұрын

I had no idea, that's so cool thanks

@meisteremm

Ай бұрын

They had great scuba gear.

@nonsequitor

Ай бұрын

Here to post same 😅👍

@nonsequitor

Ай бұрын

​@@RareEarthSeriesnow you know this. .. imagine all those documentary scenes of hippos chasing small boats... Yup, that hippo is running on the riverbed, or sinking and jumping up and forward😳😂 .kinda makes it even scarier for me. Btw it's the muscle mass that sinks them not incapacity to doggy paddle- hippo paddle?

@raedwulf61

Ай бұрын

They flew, of course.

"... but!, but, huge but - brazilian sized butt *gestures* ..." -Evan Hadfield, talking about palaeoarchaeology, 2024.

@kacperwoch4368

Ай бұрын

For a second i thought it was a Stefan Milo video.

@Hollylivengood

Ай бұрын

@@kacperwoch4368 You know Stefan is watching this, wishing he'd come up with this line.

@Nmethyltransferase

Ай бұрын

Come for the obscure stories. Lurk for an education in biology, paleontology, and anthropology. Stay for the culture.

Fun fact: The "footprints" were first found by a researcher who stumbled across them during his vacation

@OsirusHandle

Ай бұрын

that does happen quite often with fossils and so on

My daughter made an error (not a typo) on her Ph.D thesis in Human Genetics. It went unnoticed until it was published. A student spotted the error. It took her months to make everything make sense again. It happens.

I think even if you ignore the possibility of a group of hominids walking to Crete and experiencing speciation, the fact that we have innumerable examples of "random rafting events" onto small islands throughout the world and history is just too much of a giant thorn in the side of a "it's IMPOSSIBLE" debunk. I feel pretty much any biologist studying evolution should be aware of that.

@SomePotato

Ай бұрын

I was looking for this comment. Thanks.

@westenicho

25 күн бұрын

the dominant theory of apes arriving to South America from Africa is via a land raft. that journey was further back in history, and much longer. so they'd be challenging their colleagues' theories by stating it was impossible.

The possibilities which you've highlighted are actually ones which we as palaeoanthropologists and evolutionary anthropologists have also thought and discussed among our circles. Improbable, yes, but they can't be ignored. I am planning to write a paper on this in the future.

@LEFT4BASS

Ай бұрын

It’s good to keep an open mind. So many of the obvious truths we take for granted now would have once seemed like insane conspiracy theories.

@MadDoodles

Ай бұрын

@@LEFT4BASSHealthy skepticism is also good however, plenty of “common facts” have also turned out to be wrong. They are both sides of the same coin, so exercise both. :)

As a former biologist, we know something close to nothing, maybe 5%. The world is a fascinating place.

@peggysmith5202

Ай бұрын

U got that right!!

@Norralin

Ай бұрын

Former biologist? Aren't you still a biologist??

@FirstDagger

Ай бұрын

@@Norralin They could be retired.

@hope1575

Ай бұрын

​@@Norralinthat was my question lol

@hope1575

Ай бұрын

​@@FirstDagger I feel like if a biologist retires from work they are still a biologist 🤔. Leaving academia or industry doesn't undo your scientific training. "Former biologist" makes it sound like they've renounced the science altogether or something lol. Maybe if their work in that field was brief and they completely changed career paths afterwards it could make sense to me to say it that way, but that's just based on the connotations I have associated with those words and phrasing.

You don't need specialized sailing to reach Crete from mainland Greece. The island of Antikythera is 42 km away and Crete is clearly visible from an elevated point of the island. We are not discussing some star navigation

@TheGahta

Ай бұрын

So how you keep going in the right direction once your not on that high elevation? Kinda a weak reasoning

@TheGahta

Ай бұрын

@@yt.personal.identification yes a concept known in prehistory and we all know how easy keeping direction on open seas is... If you cant admit a bad take fine, but dont embarass yourself like this

@TheGahta

Ай бұрын

@@yt.personal.identification how far you can see at sea level? Whats making it not an open ocean? Its not about size but currents and the like... Just stop or start making points and not just excuses

@TheGahta

Ай бұрын

@@yt.personal.identification were not talking about what we can do with our knowledge now but if thats reasonable to imply on a ancient peoples Dont get more cringe please

@gerardtimings5625

Ай бұрын

@@TheGahta By keen observation of water currents and their colours,winds/sky conditions, types of birds and their flight patterns,and sounds. I'm descended from people who lived on the Shetlands, 60 miles north of Scotland, and they still use these techniques sometimes, even sailing at night without radar or GPS. Before those were invented they could navigate to Scotland, and elsewhere.

Even proto humans refused to ask for directions?

@malahammer

Ай бұрын

Only the male of the species 😀

@andrewhooper7603

Ай бұрын

@@malahammer The real proto humans were the friends we made along the way.

While I believe we may find evidence of earlier and more complex tool use than we currently have I'm a big believer in accidental rafting. It's a bit more plausible with pregnant rats than something on the scale of an ape but the ingredients are simple: end up in the water, can't really swim, hold on to something floating for dear life and go where the currents take you.

@purebloodedgriffin

Ай бұрын

There's also the inbetween point, where a homonid uses a log or other piece of driftwood as a raft intentionally

Speaking in my capacity as a geologist, the biggest issue for me is that the Cenozoic history of the Aegean is among the more complex within both the modern Mediterranean and the broader Eurasian-Nubian continental boundary. The folks who study the tectonics of the Aegean Microplate regularly keep coming up with refinements to our understanding of the structure & sense of motion of all of its plate boundaries. Those kind of refinements often result in significant changes in how the stratigraphic record can be interpreted, both in the specific setting of Crete and elsewhere that we learn similar things about a plate boundary. Mind you, this is all completely independent of the repeated separation of the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, which is driven by global sea levels much more than plate tectonics. But even still, both the Aegean and the basin between Crete and Africa are relatively deep, so it's worth considering tectonic evolution alongside sealevel evolution, because both would play a role in determining Crete's hypothetical past connections to other land, and indeed both may have been necessary for Crete to have ever been contiguous with the mainland. If I was ever asked to peer review a paper like those you've cited in this video (which probably wouldn't happen because I'm not a paleobiologist or archaeologist), the first thing I'd ask for is a section addressing the geologic context of the field site. What's the local rock unit; what's its sedimentary fabric; what's its relationship with the stratigraphically adjacent & geographically proximal units; what structural features does it contain; *before* getting into specific fossil or radioisotope ages & their interpretation. By itself, that discussion doesn't have much direct relevance to the question of where hominids migrated in the cenozoic. But if an argument about animal migration relies on a set of claims about where land was at a certain time, then there must be a robust analysis of how much we understand how that land itself has evolved.

@gryphon0468

Ай бұрын

Good points.

The Sailing Deers, now that's a good name for a band.

@36inc

Ай бұрын

sounds like theyd fit in with artic monkeys

@dsnodgrass4843

Ай бұрын

It'd even be good as The Sailing Deer. I could draw the logo and T-shirt already. 😂

One of the things about the 'improbable' is that given a really long time, a lot of improbable things happen.

If you're looking for teeth, Turkey is pretty close, you can get them for a low price there

@StefanMilo you got an end credit!

I think that I can provide the answer to this, at least as far as the Elephants go: one Elephant wrapped its trunk around the tail of the Elephant in front of it, so on, so forth. The lead Elephant was just a really strong swimmer. Think of "Hands across America," except more like "Elephants swimming to Crete."

@glennmungra5476

Ай бұрын

It's a known fact that elephants have been spotted swimming from the african coast to the french islands. Maybe it was an elephant with a hominin fotoprint?

@glennmungra5476

Ай бұрын

It's a known fact that elephants have been spotten swimming from the african coast to the french islands. They just have to paddle with 4 legs, keep their trunk high enough to be able to breath and know which way to swim to.

Thx for doing this, filming it and sharing it with us.

There really isn't a "missing link" anymore. It was already found, and it was actually multiple discoveries. The big picture of human evolution is very well proven and understood. Of course, there are many small questions remaining, but none of those gaps in understanding are anywhere near the significance of the what the term "missing link" meant historically.

@rantingrodent416

Ай бұрын

I was under the impression that the "missing link" people really want to know about is the immediate ancestor of homo sapiens, which I believe we still don't have, and I suppose might not look different enough from us to even be distinguishable in the fossil record?

@Croz89

Ай бұрын

It's morphed from an argument against evolution to pretty much any gap in the evolutionary timeline.

@Dimitriterrorman

12 күн бұрын

Missing link means the ape that went from quadrapedal to bipedal, we have species closely related to that and species after but we dont know exactly when we started walking upright. thats the missing link.

@nunliski

12 күн бұрын

@@Dimitriterrorman It may be the case that there are lingering questions about the transition from quadrupedal to bipedal locomotion, but that is not at all the specific meaning of "missing link." The term has no specific meaning, and scientists no longer use it. It comes from an era when much less was known about human evolution AND evolution in general. It is irrelevant and outdated now. If you don't believe me, you can confirm what I'm saying with just a few seconds of research.

Love he very subtle Stefan Milo shoutout at the end!

Let's say a tsunami hits your village. You find yourself and surviving members of your family clinging to floating debris for dear life. The debris floats wherever the material takes them and with no other choice these people cling to it and go to that place and continue living there. This would likely be the first instance of a raft, discovered by accident and remembered and adapted by those who survived. It's just a possibility.

I've been watching this channel for a bit over half a decade now. Every video makes me think about something in an interesting perspective, and I'm thankful for that. Thank you for challenging my perceptions.

What if the ape taught some sea turtles to be his conveyance across the open oceans?

@dukeon

Ай бұрын

Or a scorpion tried to convince a frog… 🤔

@Nick-zp3ub

27 күн бұрын

That ape must have been the great great grandfather of captain jack sparrow

Love the variety of all your videos, I learn so much from such obscure topics around the world. Keep up the good work!

Love the videos Evan, keep up the great work!

The mediterranean basin was where the Tanu had their civilisations during the pliocene when the humans time traveled to avoid the galactic milieu before Felice Landry broke the Gibraltar strait as revenge against Culluket. That was a very coherent sentence don't fight me.

You truly stretch my mind and imagination, and i love it. You bring such a wide variety of topics to light. Idk what my life would be like if i didn't keep learning and thinking. Thank you 😊 Carry on

I really like the way this guy isn't bias one way or the other and how he really digs into and sometimes refutes or comes up with other left out possibilities! Definitely subscribing now❤

I found a stone with an apparent footprint on it. I took it to a well known archeologist in Johannesburg. He said "we often find these, caused by erosion".

Unless the ancestors of those animals were also stranded when the Mediterranean flooded, the smaller animals could have floated on 'rafts' of storm-felled trees and other vegetation. Either the clumps were washed ashore, or came close enough for the animals to swim. The deer could also have swum, and elephants have been observed swimming (using their trunks for snorkels). Once they came ashore, enough of them stayed to produce the animals of Crete (those who left either died or never went near the ocean again).

Thanks, Rare Earth. I needed this food for thought.

Awesome as usual. ❤❤ you are totally correct. It IS possible. It has happened with others.

This is video I could read the comments on for days

the past couple of decades have seen so many new finds and revelations nothing is impossible, who knows what will be found next or where, nice job.

Love the story. Thanks from NS..

KZread's best storyteller. Period.

Beautifully, as always!

Good of you to do the asking and having an opend maind... and my I also say... that you seems to have a very smart concept about your program...

Evan 'Just Saying' Hadfield

Hippos dont swim, they're too dense. They literally just walk along the bottom.

"My boy Chuckie Dee and his love of barnacles." 😂

The one thing I’ve always felt people underestimate due to an obvious lack of evidence (the odds of such materials surviving are almost zero) is how early basic rafts might have been invented. With all the floating logs every one of them would see it doesn’t seem far fetched to me that the concept of wrapping a few together and riding it would occur to some of them.

I really like your videos my friend

@RareEarthSeries

Ай бұрын

Thank you

Well reasoned.

cool video man

So it wasn't Moses?

I watch you and Stefan Milo. rarely do your subjects overlap, though

thank you. very interesting

Frig you're good at this.

There are other theories of how certain species made it to islands when we know they didn't originate there. (This is from PBS Eons) and the conjecture is that they fed and lived near the shore, of which they "rode" there on island breakaways, landing on larger islands ie. Madagascar being the most famous one. I don't see why we can't apply this logic to a this.

Ya know what!? 🤔….Just for you being THEE ONLY channel I’ve EVER seen be so honest so fast, with the first words of their video saying there’s probably nothing true at all about their title,… I’m giving you a Sub! 👍

Sir Terry Pratchett would have said they floated there on a log...(if there was room with all the camels!)

"That's where the hominid carried you" ...awesome.

If the hypothesis is correct and turn into theory, we should named the first Crete hominid fossil Wilson from Tom Hank's movie Cast Away.

I hope if I take a ferry to Crete it's very much floating.

"The Missing link" isn't really a thing, at least not how pop culture (and kinda this vid) uses it. Also there are tons of evidence (beyond fossils -which there are also a ton off) pointing to an African origin; including artifacts, customs and simple ethnographic DNA. Europeans, Asians and Americans are all more closely related to each other than they are to Africans ('Founder effect') -Africa has the greatest amount of human genetic diversity in the world.

@RareEarthSeries

Ай бұрын

You're not wrong, but you're also speaking about homo sapien, and this is talking about a time millions of years before we (modern homo sapiens) unquestionably walked out of Africa - it would be the first hominin we'd have ever found by a substantial amount. Which is what the colloquial 'missing link' refers to here. What is being questioned, and even then rather lightly, is if the predecessor to those sapiens who blossomed in East Africa might have evolved from hominin species who developed in Europe and then walked back across the Mediterranean before evolving further in Africa's central grasslands. I'm not saying that's what happened, merely that as of yet it can't be discounted.

@LENZ5369

Ай бұрын

​@@RareEarthSeries I think I must be missing something? AFAIK 7ish million years ago - the H.sapien line was splitting (last common ancestor) from the chimpanzees, and there is no suggestion that LCA was primarily bipedal. If this Euro bipedal ape was a direct ancestor -it would either: also have to be ancestral to both chimps and our LCA with them (if it was placed earlier than the LCA), or​ (if it is placed after our LCA with chimps) our current 'australopithecine' descent path is wrong. There were alot of these apes walking/climbing around for millions of years on either side of that 7million years -frankly; one could pick any of them and make an assertion of similar or greater strength. Leaving aside that the inclusion of this Euro ape ancestor would create contradictions with the current decent paradigm from that point onward -isn't the path of inclusion (leaves Africa, as or becomes bipedal, then comes back to Africa, becomes the ancestor of (at the time) non bipedal Hominini (humans and chimps) rather convoluted?

Graecopithecus is still walking among people in Crete, as I'm sure you have already realized. They are easy to identify by their clothing and pickup trucks.

Never misses

How do you know deer can't sail?

People underestimate the urge in a nomad to see over the next ridge, both literally and figuratively.

I have casually watched your videos for years based on recommendation by the machine, but I just subscribed. Please point me to the video of yours that you think will most blow my mind. Thank you.

There's a great Science Fiction novel, it's called EVOLUTION, by Stephen Baxter. Worth the weekend long read. All about Mammals fight to the middle of the evolutionary hierarchy.

"If there were teeth in Greece, there coulda been some feet in Crete." brilliant!

6:32 Verily, a man of culture! 😭

Hey, are you even ALLOWED to answer the question in the title? I though that wasn't permitted on YT, I've never seen that done before. Thumbs up!

In my head, I beat you to the answer to the answer to the question in the title by only about one second

Anyone know if @StefanMilo *does* have a video on this?

Thank you

This is a great reminder that bad habits of thought happen on both sides. Anti-science people are always inclined to believe that a new find is far older than most think it could be while the more educated of us tend to think that anything strange and unexplainable must be an error. Not quite that cut and dried but in general, those seem to be the battle lines.

forget the 100 km between the mainland and Crete, whether they swam, rafted or clung to a tree, they probably island hopped, and no one hop needed be anywhere near 100 km.

in 2017 Sarah Thomas swam 164 km of ocean in one go. ofc she had a team feeding her energy smoothies but still. *swam*.

As Cody would say, "Beware of the BOAR, boar can swim."

i love your videos and me and my gf were absolutleys sent laughing by the first 5 seconds becuase we made the joke no probably not and you said the exact same thing hahah but then again we have watched like all your videos

It has been hypothesized but definitely not confirmed that Neanderthals ever crossed the Strait of Gibraltar.

Good luck trying to find the missing link.

I myself wouldn't put so much weight on whether an ape walked like a human especially seeing how homo naledi had so many less-than-human-seeming traits and yet was fairly modern, and even theoretically a hominin.

The term "missing link" irks me so much as by any definition that makes sense, we have it. The extreme end of that definition is every single generation of human ancestor.

Vertigo is a hard & fast way to get out of camera duty.

The idea of a species of distant hominin evolving bipedalism separately from our ancestors is intriguing!

Commiserations for anyone expecting a Rare Earth video to be a straight answer 😉🙌

@Poldovico

Ай бұрын

And a smaller subset of those expecting it to be a straight answer about... race, of all things.

Cool video 😎📸

I was going to give this fascinating video a 10/10, but then I read "A Lite Hop" in the credits. Now much like the researchers, that one detail forces me to re-evaluate everything. (Well played, now take your angry upvote and get out, lol)

hominids. other words: all hominins are also hominids. Not all hominids are hominins.

"Missing Link"? Haha, haven't heard that phrase in 40 years, immediately after the teacher/jailbirds taught it to us....

Huh, this episode was certainly different. You don't usually get so hypothetical. Still, interesting stuff.

Coming here just to also answer, “No. no, it’s not”.

Very interesting

An interesting approach by a keen amateur, which most people are unwilling to consider. Professional people have been taught to avoid speculative assessments. After all one’s career and reputation stand to suffer.

"Input the logical joke to make here that, for the purpose not being banned, I cannot post"

I know this is a stupid question and I am an ignorant fool, but schoolteachers in prison? Also, kudos for "teeth in Greece, feet in Crete". I do so love poetry.

@dsnodgrass4843

Ай бұрын

The person who stole 8 of the "footprints" was a schoolteacher.

@adamshinbrot

Ай бұрын

@@dsnodgrass4843 Thank you

Very likely that upright walking hominid would not evolve in only one place

Evan, I've been following your channel for years and I think I've watched every single one of your videos. So I'm frankly surprised and disappointed by your supposedly funny "Brazilian-sized butt" comment. Cheap. I've lived many years in both Brazil an Canada and I can categorically say that I've seen Canadian butts much, much larger than anything I've seen in Brazil... No only that, but this video had all the potential of being a commentary about how individual biases and particular agendas play a role in amplifying bad science and outright lies, but at the end it was just about the triumph of bothsideism. You are better than that, and I look forward to watching more of the well-thought insight that characterizes your earlier videos. This one was definitely uninspired.

Since 99.999% of all wood from even a couple 100Ks of years ago is gone, I'm going to guess that one of our smarter Hominins would have found at least tidal marshes irresistible to get something floating out there to harvest food, and then they would have contrived movable rafts, and some of these could have been swept out to sea. Or, an ice age could have made the sea very shallow making it easier to float over.

Love me some Milo, cheers

10:40 Hippos can't swim, they bounce along the bottom of rivers

Greetings from Brazil! 🇧🇷

To view jpaleo artwork, you must view it from every angle and every light source.

Wait.There is still a missing link that people looking for?

@RareEarthSeries

Ай бұрын

It's just a narrative device to invoke a concept people readily understand

@Poldovico

Ай бұрын

I imagine there will be one forever. Fossils are rare over the span of space AND time. You have to remember that the phenomenon we commonly describe as "this species evolved into that" just translates to "the next time we got a chance to check in on that place, different stuff was living there that had some leftover genetics from what we found last time". Whatever happened in-between is lost to us.

The creature that made those footprints was likely considering how it was going to clean the mud from between the toes.

Very true