What Happened Before History? Human Origins
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2016–2022
explainer · general · 2016–2022 on HN
Kurzgesagt's animated overview of human origins and the vast prehistory before recorded history. It covers how modern humans emerged and spread.
HN commenters recommend it as a compact, well-sourced intro to human evolution that even led one viewer to read Sapiens.
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3 comments from Hacker News
It might not be what you were thinking, but the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt has 2 very good videos on the topic: ▶ this video link His stuff is well sourced and generally reliable.
I live in a world where 90% of my friends and family believe that they came from the sins of a woman who decided to eat an apple. I recently read a book called Sapiens, this book really drilled into my mind that we homo-sapiens are a derivative of a single great ape that had two daughters, one that became the ancestor of all chimpanzees and the other all humans. If human origin interests you there is a great 10 minute video from the Youtube Kurzgesagt channel that lead me to read Sapiens. ▶ this video link
It's possible. It's just one of those explanations that we'd really love to believe, since the alternative is so unthinkable. It's been a hobby of mine to be skeptical of it. Even Kurzgesagt mentioned in passing that we're not sure if it was due to "a series of minor genocides." - ▶ this video - link If anyone knows of breadcrumbs to follow, please chime in. Genetic testing implies it should be possible to figure out how much interbreeding took place. We seem to be able to trace extinction events with some degree of accuracy, so it would be surprising if a genocide-type extinction event was easy to confuse with interbreeding.