I know I can just google the answer to this, but what I’m wondering is what exactly is the definition of an anatomically modern human? A human who can reproduce with a modern human? I’m wondering, if you go back 150,000 years and get a human from that time and raise them in modern society, would they be in any way different? Would anything give them away?
In: Biology
While a homo sapien 150,000 years ago might look like you and me, most scholars believe their brains weren’t the same. There seems to be an evolutionary change in homo sapien brains 50,000 or so years ago that led to humanity as we currently know it.
Modern humans (*Homo sapiens*) emerged about 300,000 years ago. They would look different due to differences in lifestyle and environment, but anatomically they were human.
There were other species of *Homo* extant, but H. sapiens remains the only extant species of *Hominina*
They would probably have a little more body hair, perhaps some more defined and prominent bone structure (which would look a little out of place to us). Human evolution itself took course over a few million years as well, 150 thousand years is not alot of time on the evolutionary timeline.
They’re at least 300,000 years old, and the definition is simply
“within the range of physical variation we see today”. Would an older anatomically modern human stand out in New York City? No. Not physically.
On reproduction: You’d have to go pretty far back to find a human who couldn’t make fertile offspring with humans today. Keep in mind horses and donkeys (which produce sterile mules) have a common ancestor about 5 million years ago. That’s a lot of divergence.
There is hot debate about cognitive capacity. Some say there would hardly be a difference, others say there would be an enormous difference. Most believe there would be some difference. We don’t know. Generally the older schools of thought in anthropology believed in a larger difference between the brains of people 300,000 years ago and those today, because archaeologists hadn’t found as many old artifacts yet. The ability to process language, in particular, is believed by some to have increased most significantly since 300,000 years ago as compared to problem-solving.
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