The periodic change in climate flipping the Sahara from verdant swamps to uninhabitable desert, and the fact that the Mediterranean was a river valley until ~90kya really renders the question of human origins unanswerable. We begin to see glimpses of heterotic hybridization of Homo, perhaps with Sapiens as a hypersexual basket of genetic admixtures, but we have such fragmentary evidence it's relatively facile to coin unfalsifiable hypotheses. Almost all mammals only breed in season. Three are hypersexual: Bonobo, Dolphin, and Sapiens. Sapiens females are sexually receptive even when menstruating, which perhaps explains the multiplicity of hybridization events revealed in our DNA.
Worse, funding is hunting for politically useful claims, like wolves guarding sheep.
Thanks!
Climate flipping is something I hadn't even considered!
I'm going to have to come back and chat some more on all the rest of that when I'm feeling a bit better. You're touching on topics which fascinate me.
I'm sorry to hear you're not feeling your best. I hope you soon are.
The hypersexuality of our species isn't often remarked in archaeology, which is strange because it's such a signal feature, shown in so few species. I have no information on the sexual seasons of other hominins, but since the vast majority of mammals, including primates, are seasonal breeders, it seems likely most hominins were as well.
In such species it is the females which determine seasons, and males generally are willing and able to sire offspring whenever females go into estrus. In the situation where Sapiens females were constantly in estrus, as today, males of other hominins would not be prevented by seasonality from interbreeding, while male Sapiens would be far less likely to contribute genetically to species with seasons, as presumably their own males would dominate in season.
I have often considered Sapiens to be ill-named, preferring the designation H. vulgaris, or H. domesticus, to be more appropriate, because of our quite hybridized genetic material making us something of a common derived from multiple species of Homo. We are also clearly a domesticated species, almost certainly singularly so in Homo, making the designation of domesticus quite appropriate.
We are not so wise as we are common, and domesticated. Our ancestors had brains ~25% larger than our own today, and Neanderthals larger brains than us by ~20%. While there is no direct correlation between individual brain size and IQ apparent today, there certainly is on a species level, and I very much doubt we are the smartest hominins to have walked the Earth.
I would bet the farm on us being the most hybridized and domesticated though.
I've never really studied these things much, but have occasionally caught the odd documentary which delved into these things. There have been a couple that have stuck in my mind. One was a theory from some evidence that Neanderthal may not have been wiped out by Sapiens so much as bred into them, with the outward Sapien physical characteristics being dominant, so they aren't apparent in us. We still have stronger and weaker genetic characteristics in different races even today.
The other was some evidence found of some remote village in Russia, I think, where the villagers had bred with what we'd call a yeti or big foot. They unearthed one of the offspring that survived from that union. It's entirely possible there have been other hominid survivors into recent times that we've labelled myths.