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Articles by snakes. He
What if the Dinosaurs Hadn’t Gone Extinct? Why Our World Might Look Very Different
Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs and changed the course of evolution. The skies darkened and plants stopped photosynthesizing. The plants died, then the animals that fed on them. The food chain collapsed. Over 90 percent of all species vanished. When the dust settled, all dinosaurs except a handful of birds had gone extinct. But this catastrophic event made human evolution possible.
Looks, Brains, Personality: How Will Humans Change in the Next 10,000 Years?
READER QUESTION: If humans don’t die out in a climate apocalypse or asteroid impact in the next 10,000 years, are we likely to evolve further into a more advanced species than what we are at the moment? Harry Bonas, 57, Nigeria Humanity is the unlikely result of four billion years of evolution. From self-replicating molecules in Archean seas, to eyeless fish in the Cambrian deep, to mammals scurrying from dinosaurs in the dark, and then, finally, improbably, ourselves—evolution shaped us.
How a Handful of Prehistoric Geniuses Launched Humanity’s Technological Revolution
For the first few million years of human evolution, technologies changed slowly. Some three million years ago, our ancestors were making chipped stone flakes and crude choppers. Two million years ago, hand-axes. A million years ago, primitive humans sometimes used fire, but with difficulty. Then, 500,000 years ago, technological change accelerated, as spearpoints, firemaking, axes, beads, and bows appeared. This technological revolution wasn’t the work of one people.
How the Extinction of Ice Age Mammals May Have Forced Us to Invent Civilization
Why did we take so long to invent civilization? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilization—harvesting, then domestication of crop plants—began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilizations appearing 6,400 years ago. For 95 percent of our species’ history, we didn’t farm, create large settlements, or form complex political hierarchies. We lived in small, nomadic bands, hunting and gathering. Then, something changed.
Evolution Tells Us We Might Be the Only Intelligent Life in the Universe
Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely—or once. Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations—not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself—were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable.
Would We Still See Ourselves as ‘Human’ if Other Hominin Species Hadn’t Gone Extinct?
In our mythologies, there’s often a singular moment when we became “human.” Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge and gained awareness of good and evil. Prometheus created men from clay and gave them fire. But in the modern origin story, evolution, there’s no defining moment of creation. Instead, humans emerged gradually, generation by generation, from earlier species.
When Did Humans Start Experimenting With Alcohol and Drugs?
Humans constantly alter the world. We fire fields, turn forests into farms, and breed plants and animals. But humans don’t just reshape our external world—we engineer our internal worlds, and reshape our minds. One way we do this is by upgrading our mental “software,” so to speak, with myths, religion, philosophy and psychology. The other is to change our mental hardware—our brains. And we do that with chemistry.
One Incredible Ocean Crossing May Have Made Human Evolution Possible
Humans evolved in Africa, along with chimpanzees, gorillas, and monkeys. But primates themselves appear to have evolved elsewhere—likely in Asia—before colonizing Africa. At the time, around 50 million years ago, Africa was an island isolated from the rest of the world by ocean—so how did primates get there? A land bridge is the obvious explanation, but the geological evidence currently argues against it.
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