According to real history how long ago did humans live?

Question

I am referring to walking upright, speaking a language kind of human.

Answer 1

The first humans who were without a doubt our own species are the people who lived at the Blombos Cave area in South Africa. And they are known to have lived about 70,000 to 90,000 years ago.

The title of Christopher Henshilwood's article last year, "Modern humans and symbolic behaviour: Evidence from Blombos Cave, South Africa" is important in answering your question. These are the earliest people to have made polished bone tools. They also made beautiful "bifacial" points. And they engraved patterns of lines into ochre oblongs.

This kind of skill is a clue that they had minds like ours, and could speak. After all, they were able to appreciate art. They decorated themselves with shell beads--something, by the way, Neanderthals (who lived when the Blombos people lived) didn't do. Nor did any of the "archaic homo sapiens" that I know of.

Most people who have looked at the evidence believe that the Blombos people were so advanced that it would be strange if they didn't speak a language like our own, with a regular grammer and vocabulary that was richer than earlier forms of humanity.

There is no evidence as convincing from any people earlier than they are. The stone tools before Blombos were cruder, there was no art or very little, and no engraving of line patterns.

Walking upright occurred much earlier. Foot bones and leg bones like ours date back to earlier than 3.5 million years ago--the date of the first footprints that definitely show upright walking. That was at Laetoli.

But this early, and even up to 500,000 years ago, some very simple languages were probably used (accompanied by gestures to make them clear). It seems the throat was not developed much beyond a baby's throat today. So the kinds of sounds they were able to make couldn't have been very adept by our standards. The way their bodies were made, including I think, the nerves in the tongue, probably kept the attempts at language very simple until quite late in human evolution. Much of this is guesswork, since nobody who heard the early people has passed down what they sounded like to us. But it's educated guesswork.

Answer 2

Historically,

According to what history?

Different histories have different origin points of humanity.

So you're asking the wrong question. Ask, according to the ancient 'Egyptians', how old is humanity? Or, according to the ancient Hebrews, or Mayans. (since I know two of those had calendars more accurate than ours.)

Factually, when did modern people appear? Well, think about it.

History is a fairly new concept, it wasn't always around.

Further, the first modern humans probably mumbled, and didn't really have any official languages. So you would need to define 'language'.

To get to the point, and answer the question in simplicity:

I'm going to answer 2 questions, since I don't know which one you're asking out of:

A)How long ago did modern humans live?

B)How long ago did we start behaving, well, human [modern]?

A) 130,000 years ago, is when we started to appear.

B) People started acting in a cognitively "modern" way circa 80,000 years ago circa south africa, in blombos cave. (fishing, abstract thought, geometric designs, etc.)

Answer 3

What we commonly think of as human ancestors (like the autralopithecines) appeared around 2.5 million years ago. These guys were walking upright, or close to it. What think of as anatomically modern humans didn't really appear until the last 200,000 years, certainly by 60,000 years ago. This is what the fossil record says, at any rate. We don't actually know if any other hominid species was capable of language, since we have never seen one alive, and only have skeletal remains to go by. The only species we are dead certain was capable of language is our own species.

Answer 4

Walking upright most of the time, just beyond "Lucy" from East Africa, the Olduvai Gorge, about 2.5 million years ago. The same family of anthropologists, the Leakys, are trying to get another one certified, from Discovery.com about 4.0 million years ago.
"Lucy" walked upright and had the equipment to speak guttural and the other one could walk upright but didn't have the throat equipment to just grunt. Lot's of controversy.

Answer 5

well thats actually complex as the earliest bipedal creatures are as far back as 10 million years (eg Sahelanthropus tchadensis), speaking required the brain to do some developing (in Broccas area, the frontal lobe) and this is thought to have possibly devloped around 2.4 million years ago...but this would have been primative and probably used more hand signs...proper language may not have been around till around 90,000 years ago...its possible that H.habilis, H.erectus and archaic H.sapiens may have used language, but getting a brain cavity cast to tell us if the Broccas area had devloped is hard if the skulls are not complete.

Answer 6

No one can exactly say when a language speaking human formed, as humans were developed far before languages originated, they cam over hundreds of years. Although historians say that the Homosapien(human) was made in the cenozoic era(the current era).

Answer 7

Homo erectus has a large portion of its brain that seems to be developed for language but its nerves passages in its spine indicate little lung control. I suspect H. erectus of over a million years ago to have developed a crude language. Heidelbergensis of 300,000 probably had it since Neanderthals have highly developed Hyoid bones as do we and H. heidelbergensis are the supposed common ancestor.

Answer 8

what exactly is "real history"? as a graduate of anthropology who also took several history courses i have never come across that term.

Answer 9

Silly question ! We all know the entire universe is only 6,000 years old ! There's talking snakes and 900 year old men ! And the planet earth is flat!

Answer 10

Five hundred thousand years ago.