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

The Southern Levant, situated between modern day southern Syria via Israel to Sinai, has a spatiotemporally dense and continuous Paleolithic archaeological record offering a unique opportunity to detect faunal changes, including those predating the appearance of Homo sapiens (Bar-Yosef, 1980; Stutz, 2014). It is thus a suitable model to test long-term changes in the body mass of mammalian assemblages, in view of paleoclimates and changing human lineages, to decipher whether climate and/or humans are responsible for animal body size declines. The excellent archaeological record can further illuminate whether size declines are observed since hominins first colonized the region, or whether they start with the emergence of Homo sapiens (Louys et al., 2021), or are concentrated in the last glacial and its aftermath. We tested whether the size, and size changes, in hominin prey through the Pleistocene and early Holocene were related to time, the prevailing human lineages and cultures, paleoenvironment, and temperatures.

It’s time for us to upgrade our Paleolithic memory

As one of the authors recently pointed out [2], the cognitive demands on a person in a low-tech, paleolithic environment equal or exceed the cognitive loads placed on members of industrialized societies.

Paleo