​
How different early Homo Sapiens were compared to modern people? We are existing for 200.000 years, and the first civilizations are 6000 years old. Did early humans were drastically different from us? Would their intellect or thought patterns be similar to ours? Brain and body structure? Could they be taught modern technology?
Could they adapt to the modern society, and be raised as modern humans?
In: Biology
Anthropologists believe they were basically the same as modern humans, provided they were *Homo sapiens sapiens*. They buried their dead, they made art. They enjoyed sex. They had fun with their kids. They were as smart as people today.
There may have been slight facial differences with modern humans but there are a wide range of face shapes with modern humans and they would fit into that range. So like you might see one and while you might not be able to identify them as looking like people of a given ethnicity, you wouldn’t think that no human would look that way. Early modern humans in Europe were dark skinned but blue eyes came along earlier than skin color became the very pale color that exists now, so you might see a blue eyed person with darker skin, an unusual combination today.
One change in the past 10,000 years is teeth. Ancient humans had an edge-to-edge bite. Front teeth, top and bottom, met at the edge. Nowadays almost everyone has the front upper teeth be in front of the lower front teeth, overlapping a bit. But ancient modern humans would use front teeth to bite down on meat and tear pieces off, pulling the incisors into alignment. They also had perfect teeth for the most part, with more muscular jaws, and that would affect their appearance. They wouldn’t have most of the diseases of modern life such as nearsightedness, tooth decay, acne, etc. they lived in small groups so many of the diseases of high density living didn’t exist or seldom happened, like measles, smallpox, sexually transmitted infections, maybe colds and flu.
Archaic Homo sapiens, meaning people pretty far back on that timeline you give, like 100,000-200,000 years ago, might have had more differences in appearance—they’d be more robust, bigger muscles, thicker brow ridges, less prominent chin.
Women’s bodies would be quite different in the sense that they might only ovulate and have periods fairly seldom because they’d be pregnant a lot and under the conditions they lived in, they would nurse for several years and not be fertile or have a period for most of that time.
Latest Answers