let's just 00:29:52 talk a little bit about their vocal apparatus what kinds of sounds could they have made very often when linguists are talking about the evolution of speech they talk about sounds were they capable of making sounds Homo erectus 00:30:05 would have been roughly a talking gorilla they had the vocal apparatus that is much more similar to a gorilla they couldn't have made all the sounds we made the sounds they made would have sound more muffled does that mean they 00:30:19 couldn't have language no it doesn't mean that at all there are a lot of people today that have speech impediments that can't make the same range of sounds we make but they certainly have language

most intriguing to me was the discovery which even today some 00:23:13 archaeologists deny but the evidence is actually overwhelming that oceans were no barriers to erectus they sailed across oceans so this is a quote from a 00:23:24 very good book on Paleolithic Stone Age seafarers Paleolithic books our ancestors have often been painted as unintelligent brutes however this simply is not the case evidence suggests that at least homo erectus and perhaps even 00:23:37 pre erectus hominids were early seafarers based on this evidence it seems that our early ancestors were successful seafarers biological studies suggest that considerable numbers of founder populations so when we find 00:23:50 evidence of erectus tools on an island there had to have been 2250 erectus arrived they're more or less the same time it's not just that one erectus got there we also know and I'll go into this 00:24:03 that they didn't just wash ashore it would have been almost impossible some archaeologists suggest that they got there by tsunamis but when I talked to friends of mine who are earth scientists they say that's not how 00:24:17 tsunamis work you know the tsunamis are pushing water to land and it is possible that afterwards some things flow out but most of the energy is towards the land and it is true that a few animals have 00:24:30 made it but we don't find regular systematic colonization by humans waiting to ride tsunamis most people don't try to do that

they were the smartest creature in the history of 00:16:32 the world when they came about no creature had ever been that smart think about gorillas and all the things that a gorilla can do or a chimpanzee they would have been far beyond any any other ape in their tech in their 00:16:44 intellectual abilities and their cognitive abilities they were more successful than we have been they lasted almost two million years they overlapped with sapiens for a hundred and forty 00:16:55 thousand years it could have been as much as three hundred and forty thousand years but we we appeared either two hundred thousand years ago or four hundred thousand years ago but whatever we're newcomers compared to Homo erectus

Prof. Meiri: "Our study tracked changes at a much higher resolution over a considerably longer period of time compared to previous research. The results were illuminating: we found a continual, and very significant, decline in the size of animals hunted by humans over 1.5 million years. For example, a third of the bones left behind by Homo erectus at sites dated to about a million years ago, belonged to elephants that weighed up to 13 tons (more than twice the weight of the modern African elephant) and provided humans with 90% of their food. The mean weight of all animals hunted by humans at that time was 3 tons, and elephant bones were found at nearly all sites up to 500,000 years ago. "Starting about 400,000 years ago, the humans who lived in our region -- early ancestors of the Neandertals and Homo sapiens, appear to have hunted mainly deer, along with some larger animals weighing almost a ton, such as wild cattle and horses. Finally, in sites inhabited by modern humans, from about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately 70% of the bones belong to gazelles -- an animal that weighs no more than 20-30kg. Other remains found at these later sites came mostly from fallow deer (about 20%), as well as smaller animals such as hares and turtles."