Thinking About Human Evolution
Jack Adams' channel: / pebblestudio
CORRECTION
As user 'P' pointed out in a comment, I mistakenly typed 'stepmother' in the slide where the chimpanzee was cleaning the teeth of a dead relative. I should have written 'adoptive mother' (which I luckily think I said in the voice-over). Here is a link to a paper discussing adoption of orphaned individuals within chimpanzee communities: journals.plos.org/plosone/art...
Other Further Reading
A 2005 article about one of the rare occasions that fossil chimpanzees have been discovered: www.nature.com/articles/natur...
A 2015 article about primates producing tools for future use: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/f...
An overview of of the subject of empathy in non-human apes: www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepos...
A 2006 paper on the late survival of Neanderthals in Gibraltar: www.nature.com/articles/natur...
Tom Björklund: / tombjorklundart , @tombjorklundart .
Homo naledi: elifesciences.org/articles/09560
Пікірлер: 745
Title reads like Simon can consciously resume evolution as a human and is only considering doing so
@helenahandkart1857
3 жыл бұрын
😂
@sidarthurgortimer355
3 жыл бұрын
And his facial hair makes it look like he's decided to evolutionarily regress a bit instead.
@johngavin1175
3 жыл бұрын
@@sidarthurgortimer355 Not a bad thing,wish I could regress myself at times.
@marcasdebarun6879
3 жыл бұрын
@@johngavin1175 Im sure we all wish we could return to monky every now and again
@kolaloka9573
3 жыл бұрын
@@johngavin1175 return to monke
Such a truly important point to make at 3.26: evolution is about adaptation to existing environmental conditions. Love it Simon.
@simonroper9218
3 жыл бұрын
Thank you Jack - I'll try to reply to your email tomorrow, and we'll discuss it further soon! I'm sure you've got a lot of wisdom to share.
@yerdasellsavon9232
3 жыл бұрын
This reads like you're talking about a Bible verse from a book about evolution
@subplantant
3 жыл бұрын
I tend to conceptualise evolution by analogy to water taking the shape of its container.
@keithoutsidethebox6707
3 жыл бұрын
@@simonroper9218 Simon, I've been watching some of your videos in recent months. Excellent presentations. To date, my favourite Theory, in regards to Behavioural Modern H.sapien sapien evolution is the Vendramini’s Neanderthal Predation Theory. Many people are shocked/thrown off by the Theory, but the more I read it, the more I agreed with it. I think the negativity behind it, is that we can't have the opportunity to anthomorphise H. neanderthalensis, or any species/subspecies of the Homo genus, which ourselves love to do.
@cam-gv2gf
3 жыл бұрын
thanks captain obvious
the dot matrix tree is an excellent example on how to show spciation. Well done sir
One of my favourites so far. …'behaviour can't be fossilised'... - my mind went off in so many directions. Great work. Your delivery is ASMR like and the language so very accessible.
Dude. I’m 38 years old. I’ve been obsessed with anthropology and paleoanthropology, modern humans and evolution my whole life, and this video just taught me so much. Thanks for taking the time to do this!
@arta.xshaca
Жыл бұрын
You're obsessed with "modern humans", huh.
@Lausanamo
6 ай бұрын
@@arta.xshaca Maybe he is an alien?
is no one going to talk about the picture of his pal toby
@lionhartd138
3 жыл бұрын
Oh yeah, he's cancelled now for sure. Sheer audacity I tell you...
@bryanr1868
3 жыл бұрын
Paused the video and went to the comments straightaway. Cheers to Toby
A subject I've found endlessly fascinating since I was a spotty 70's teenager. I was already subscribed to your channel for your Enlish language medieval content. You're knowledge base is even more impressive than I had realised this video is thought provoking & very fresh in it's approach to such a wonderfully evocative subject. More content like this in future please!
@simonroper9218
3 жыл бұрын
Thank you - I've similarly been fascinated since I was a spotty (10's) teenager! It's just a constantly-changing field, and it would be great to do more on it - it's good to see somebody else as interested in it as I am :)
@animavideography1379
3 жыл бұрын
@@simonroper9218 I can never understand why most people are NOT fascinated by this subject Simon, I mean how could one NOT be very curious about whete we literally come from in deep time?! And agreed yes it's currently the golden age of discovery both in the field & lab with genetic research into our origins...I eagerly await the next breakthrough in a succession of recent ones as no doubt you do too Simon!
@multi-purposebiped7419
3 жыл бұрын
@@simonroper9218 I've been contemplating evolution a lot recently. Thanks for this new insight, which has certainly expanded my conception.
Dibs on "The Human Chimpanzee Divergence" as a band name
@tomrogue13
3 жыл бұрын
I'll play bass
@garethparsons3902
3 жыл бұрын
You will need a crazy drummer
@c4call
3 жыл бұрын
Not sure this is the platform upon which to claim dibs on a band name 🤔
11:41 you painted that- you’re an artist Simon?
@Rockypf2
3 жыл бұрын
He's posted art a couple of times in the past kzread.info/dash/bejne/o2pt1sSYeJyakdI.html
@Rockypf2
3 жыл бұрын
kzread.info/dash/bejne/i4Jq2MeOYMmvaaQ.html
That last painting! Extraordinary. I felt like the eyes were looking into my soul.
@bioniclegoblin6495
3 жыл бұрын
She seems so alive... and normal, in her own way. I feel there's less distance compared to some other depictions of palaeolithic humans.
I always try to be conscious of conformation bias, but today I learned about preservation bias...
Simon's beginning to look like a pirate.
@RealUlrichLeland
3 жыл бұрын
@@jamesalfredburchiii4052 Lol we were all thinking it
@CatastrophicalPencil
3 жыл бұрын
How else did you think he got the name Roper?
@billythedog-309
3 жыл бұрын
Darwin would be envious of that beard.
@SoxExcalibur
3 жыл бұрын
i mean he is british
I've been needing another Simon Roper video. Great stuff!!!!
I love how you're going down the same rabbit hole as I did. From language to archaic language to the origins of language to human evolution.
@simonroper9218
3 жыл бұрын
I actually went the other way round! I think evolution partly led on to the interest in language. I'm glad other people have also found these interests through their connections to each other! :)
@thinking-ape6483
3 жыл бұрын
@@simonroper9218 What do you think of Dan Everett's challenge to traditional Chomskyian assumptions about language?
I really like the title of the video, it seems like an invitation, but also clearly says what the video is, and is about.
Can you do a video on how laughing developed as an important way to communicate (and crying, by the same token)? Loved this video btw.
@clappedoutmotor
3 жыл бұрын
Isn't laughing an evolutionary throwback to chimpanzees showing their teeth to another chimpanzee, thusly showing that they don't consider the other chimp a threat? I remember reading that once.
@FeedsNoSliesMusic
3 жыл бұрын
@@clappedoutmotor How does showing your teeth show that you're not a threat? That sounds like it's patching up a couple of holes, as it were.
@adehl4805
3 жыл бұрын
@@clappedoutmotor chimpanzees & other great apes do have laugh like vocalizations during play in captivity & in the wild iirc
@clappedoutmotor
3 жыл бұрын
@@FeedsNoSliesMusic You are probably right. The act of baring teeth is definitely an aggressive move. Maybe its the vocalizations I was thinking of.
@jeromecarney
3 жыл бұрын
A book I read many years ago on comedy writing, that dissected the interplay between laughter and tension, led me firmly to the hypothesis that laughter evolved in mammals from the sigh of relief. A hearty guffaw permits the rapid release of stored oxygen, heightened energy and the bath of hormones that humans summon whenever faced with a fight or flight trigger, real or perceived. Once the threat has passed, it is in our strategic biological interest to return our bodies to stasis as quickly as possible, rather than waste precious resources unnecessarily. Laughter not only relieves the tense situation at hand, but can also help release previously stored tension that has yet to be expelled. In other words - the saying is old because the saying is true - laughter often is the best medicine.
really, you calmness makes your videos very likable, even more so when presenting a well presented topic
"Any animal can think something that's not true in our opinion." ... That reminds me of Billi the "talking" cat - and also other housecats - who seem to assume that humans can control the weather. If they want to go outside and it rains, they complain to their human and seem to demand the human makes the rain go away.
@erink476
3 жыл бұрын
or there was one video on Instagram where it appeared that Bunny, a dog who has word buttons, wanted her human to stop the waves under their beach house. Or maybe she was just complaining that the noise was bothering her. But it's not entirely unreasonable for cats and dogs to think these things, after all, we can make the shower and the kitchen sink stop and go, and turn the lights on and off, and make food appear out of hard round things, why can't we control the weather?
@johannageisel5390
3 жыл бұрын
@@erink476 I don't know exactly about the waves video - as far as I can remember Bunny only mentioned the waves. But there was another one, when they lost power and some contractors came and fixed the power line and Bunny was like: "Make them go away, I want to sleep!" (At least, that's our interpretation.)
My favorite subject to learn about and you do it in such a concise and engaging way, thank you!
Great vid Simon ! Straight forward and easy to understand
What an absolutely outstanding video. Well done! More of this please!
Thanks for the heads-up about the syntax video at the end, I absolutely would have missed that and it would have been a shame! Very interesting video as always, and I really like your style of presentation!
I'd love to watch more videos on stuff like this as well as the linguistics videos. This is really interesting!
Can’t wait for the hunter gatherer video!
Excellent, thoughtful video Simon, thanks.
Absolutely love your content!
I wish I had had your presentation to use with my Senior IB biology students. You make many great points.
This is so interesting, thank you for creating this content
superb talk. Absolutely wonderful, informative and paradigm expanding. Thank you very much, from a very impressed writer in sunny Manchester :)
Love your style, looking forward to the next one
Simon Roper, keep going mate. Love your videos Fascinating incite to the past.
Great video. Evolution is so commonly misunderstood. This treatment was thoughtful and really interesting too.
i loved this, and i look forward to more of your thoughts on this, and related, topics.
Yet another fascinating video Simon.
another great video, thank you Simon
thank you simon. love these videos
Very interesting video, thank you for this Simon
I enjoyed this tremendously, thank you.
Wonderful stuff. Enjoyed watching thanks!
Super interesting :) love your content and your interests
Love this departure from the usual fare!
I'm just about to finish my MPhil in human evolution at Cambridge, and I did my undergrad dissertation on the origins of language and symbolic thinking at UCL. Feel free to message me if you need any more material, I've got loads of interesting references.
@odinfredrikrustad7450
3 жыл бұрын
link to any introductory content on your work? gl on your efforts
@AlexSalikan
3 жыл бұрын
@@odinfredrikrustad7450 Do you mean content that I've written, or just introductory reading to get you started on the subject?
@kuningas1101
3 жыл бұрын
@@AlexSalikan I would be interested in either one!
@AlexSalikan
3 жыл бұрын
@@kuningas1101 No problem. It sounds stupid, but I always start with Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page for Timeline of Human Evolution is a really good place to start, in my opinion, and so is the Wikipedia page for List of Human Evolution Fossils. Those pages will link to all the relevant species, and there you can see what man-made objects are associated with what species. That should give you a really good idea of the big picture, and from there you'll probably start forming your own initial opinions about just how smart each species was, and what they were able to imagine in their mind's eye. It's also important to remember how smart our closest living relatives are. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have all been successfully taught to communicate with humans using basic hand signs. Is that proof that they're capable of symbolic thinking? If so, could our common ancestors have been capable of symbolic thinking too? You decide. Let me know if that's a bit too introductory, or if there's anything in particular you'd like to know about. Edit: I also recommend watching Sarah Hrdy's presentation called "The Origin of Emotionally Modern Humans" on KZread. That will get you started on why we're so different from other apes.
@kuningas1101
3 жыл бұрын
@@AlexSalikan Alright, will do. I've had a decent amount of encounters with 20th century French anthropology (Lévi-Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan, Durand, etc.), but it might actually be good to go back and try to figure out the basics, since I can't lie and act like I know all too much about evolution. Thank you for your response!
Fantastic video, Simon. Some lovely art presented here, I'd be fascinated to hear your thoughts on the quandaries of artistic reconstructions of the subjects of anthropological and archaeological study, be they illustrations, sculptures or dioramas. I agree with you that making some kind of effort to create images and impressions of these things helps hugely to expand the ways we think about them, yet I'm always left wondering in which ways the artist may have missed the mark, and how much it matters if they did. I then think that there seems to be little way of knowing for sure, at least until new evidence comes along.
Really enjoy your videos, Simon
Excellent video once again Simon!
Amazing video Simon...great info
Classic Roper, wouldn’t be the same without roadworks, cars, planes... Good stuff Simon 👍
Love your channel! I am from Kazakhstan and here I don´t have any resources to have such knowledge as you do. But thank the Internet, and may God bless the souls of people who invented it)))
This is so interesting! Love it! Simon, please do more videos on Evolution!
Its refreshing to listen to you, since you don't proclaim to know the absolute truth, but show differentiated research
Excellent video, I really enjoyed listening.
Excellent. Very interesting video (and I could hear no noise)
Love the shirt! You are rockin 1971!!💖💖
@helenahandkart1857
3 жыл бұрын
It's a beauty!💗
@johnhaller7017
3 жыл бұрын
@@helenahandkart1857 Cycle dealick!
For some strange reason I watched the whole video. You're good at this.
Very informative. Please keep posting
Really fascinating, Simon, thanks for lending your mind & knowledge in creating this bridge for many of us. You've some good painting skills there, too, did you use a model to some degree? How d'ya reckon those people shaved & clipped their moustaches? (Just being cheeky, this last!) Thanks too, for all the great links! 🐵🦧🦍🧔👍
Just the most perfect lovely video ... thanks Simon. Thank you. I am (through experience) naturally wary of KZread videos with titles like this ... you have categorically not followed that format.
Really fascinating . Thank you
I am impressed by the fantasy art associated with these vids they become more modern with every episode. Once upon a time far far away.My daughter loved the three bears.
very interesting video... thanks Simon
Really good. Look forward to more.
I love your painting!
Thanks Simon excellent explanation
Another fascinating video.
excellent video, thank you for the information S imon
So interesting - think I'm going to have to rewatch this one to fully shake my ideas into new patterns! It's a little scary how much "pop anthropology/paleontology" (along with pop psychiatry!) influences majorly important parts of our collective thinking? Particularly in terms of what constitutes "civilisation", how we relate to nature, and what group behaviors are considered inherent vs learned... BTW really like the long hair + beard/mo look for you, Simon, it really seems to suit face shape etc! 👍
AH! Thank you Simon! This video so succinctly and eloquently targets the dangerous misconceptions that undergird the the """lay""" understanding of evolution. Going to save this one for the next time someone comes at me with some bullshit about "the direction of progress"
Thanks for this video. I'm not convinced by the theory of human evolution - but your student-beard look is beginning to persuade me again.
@emilyb5278
2 жыл бұрын
It's not theory there are skulls bones fossils and dna it's pretty factual that we evolved just like other animals. In some snakes they still find hip bones from when it had legs
Just as we were geo centric in the past, we tend to be, understandably, species centric now. Simon reminds us that this is just a view and that this can be revised at any time, by greater knowledge and by any number of external phenomena. Solar flares are top of my random phenomena list. The Carrington event of 1859 is a good starting point to clarify our centric assumptions. By 1859, we had only just established a global, telegraph system! And then.......? A version of that graph of our human origins with the crowning glory of city dwellers at it's apex, may well be rediscovered as a petroglyph on some cave wall at some remote time in the future. Keep up the good work Simon.
Re: disposal of the dead. It is noticeable that there is a recent trend regarding "lost at sea" whereby people in some cases wish their drowned relatives to be brought to the surface for burial or cremation on land (e.g. sinking of a fishing boat). 'Buried at sea' was once thought of an acceptable fate.
@bioniclegoblin6495
3 жыл бұрын
Till recently, there was not much to be done about it, I reckon.
@davidweihe6052
3 жыл бұрын
I assume that the corpses were expected to be buried, rather exposed to vultures or cremated. This could be from a desire for them to be visitable, rather than located somewhere hundreds of feet below the surface at a location hard to get to, like on the Andrea Doria. Also, the dead must be fairly recent, or you just have the leavings of local crustaceans (ugh!).
Simon Roper what a cool guy good man thanks for the video
Very logical, rational, and well put together presentation.
Superb video, great art and a nice shirt! If I was to guess the brand by the naked eye, I'd say Jenson and Samuel. You may like some of Joe Browns shirt offerings as they also do paisleys and distinctive patterns (I wear 'em myself!).
nice stuff my lad
Fantastic video
i hope many students find your video channel
I absolutely loved this! Thank you.
This is quality content.
12:33 “Some people keep them and socially interact with them...” What’s that, Mother? A new guest?
Great content.
Can’t believe I’m crying about the chimpanzee stepmother 😥
@Story-Voracious66
3 жыл бұрын
❤️
@paulohagan3309
3 жыл бұрын
Oh man, I've seen some pictures of Chimpanzees and their rituals with the dead and elephants too. Would break your heart ...
A splendid video to listen to with my morning toast & the dawn chorus starting up. More please! I think a short pause when new text come up. Just long enough to read it. Even after being online since '97 I can't properly absorb text if I'm listening closely to the spoken word. I hear kids who've grown up online can do this. I'm sceptical until I see experimental results. Does comprehension suffer if doing both at the same time? I'd put my money on Yes! Great subject though. I enjoyed it.
Lovely Paisley shirt Simon. I have the same one in green
@simonroper9218
3 жыл бұрын
Thank you! It would look good in green, I might try to track one down :)
At 9:54 the chimps are just trying to play a game of Wall Ball, but it's kinda difficult to find walls and balls in the jungle. So competitive "Tree Rocks" is there next best option.
Cheers Simon
hey simon. do more stuff youre great.
INteresting - thanks Simon. Can I ask, are you familiar with Yuval Harari's work, and his views on religion and culture? What do you think of those?
Thank you for this infinitely interesting video!!!!! Need more of this thinking of how to think about evolution....so many variables that linear thinking leading to the sometimes narrow concepts shouldn't be standard. So much of the unknown not surviving outside of stone, bone, and rare art...filling in the blanks isn't easy. I love this video.
Simon should make more videos like this
Will your video on hunter-gatherers be specifically about Western Hunter-Gatherers? Your picture at 16:55 reminded me of the lost phenotypes of those populations and the challenges they may have faced with the arrival of farming populations from Anatolia. I always found the idea of these lifestyles clashing together absolutely fascinating. Keep up the good work young one
the most interesting thing in this video (not because it's uninteresting but because i already know this stuff) is how you mentioned that our ancestors lived in grasslands and that this is why our fossils were preserved so well. this seems like it's possibly a similar error to the idea that our ancestors lived in caves, because we found most of their bones preserved in caves, when really it was not the case that they especially lived in caves, it was just that the ones that did had their remains preserved more.
@mondopinion3777
3 жыл бұрын
Great observation ! You just erased another false narrative from my mind, planted there by media and educators. Thanks :)
Love your channel man
We're often blinkered and sometimes by ourselves.
You are a rare and wonderful bird!
The hallway metaphor in the opening to TV's "Get Smart" might be a good metaphor for speciation (removing the humorous part, perhaps)?
Hey Simon, wondering if you've read/have any opinions on "Catching Fire" by Richard Wrangham? He advocates the thesis that preparing/cooking food was the primary engine driving the development of basically every unique trait of modern humans. E.G, more efficient calorie extraction allowed our guts to get smaller which freed up energy budget for our brains to get larger. I had to read it for a lower level undergraduate course, and had some reservations about it both due to the quality of the class, the pop-sci nature of the book, and the monocausal way he seems to explain everything. Though the arguments themselves seemed logical enough. Where do serious academics stand on the "cooking hypothesis?"
Looking forward to the Hunter-Gatherer video.
Nicely put Simon. Really apprecIate your unpretentious intelligence. Important the clear the air of spurious teleological ideas. Interesting to see you branching out from your euro-linguistic territory. I've become quite a fanboy of genomic archeology - denisovans etc. I'd be interested you hear your thoughts about that work - seems to me it might defuse implicit racism in archeological thought - ie H Sapiens was not the (white) victor over weaker species/races, but successful because inherently hybrid. As Jenny Holzer said - random mating is good for the species. And who knew, you're handy with a brush too.
You always sound like a sage University professor!
Simon your painting looks nice. Those that say you got the look wrong well that is there perceptions no one know what they looked like...