These facts are not written in history textbooks, and in general they try not to recall them often. The ancients were perhaps the strangest human community that ever existed. And the history and evolution of our species itself is far from as unambiguous as it seems at first glance.
Over the entire history of mankind, which began about 162 thousand years ago, more than 107 billion people were born on Earth.
In the pre-industrial era, that is, until about the 19th century, 90% of all people on the planet died of hunger, cold and disease. The wars did not take as many lives as it seems.
Only in 2009, for the first time in the history of mankind, the number of the urban population equaled the number of the rural population. The entire previous history of the agrarians was much more.
It took humanity more than 100 thousand years to reach a population of 2 billion, and only 40 years to double this number afterwards.
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It took the ancient people 80 thousand years to get from Africa to Alaska. And then to settle down on both American continents - only 2000 years.
Almost two million years, up to the VIII millennium BC. e. several types of people lived on Earth at once. But in the end, Homo Sapiens simply exterminated everyone else.
The ancestors of a fairly large part of modern mankind were a small population (about 2000 people), which survived 75 thousand years ago a powerful supervolcano eruption and 20 years of winter.
Almost all animals on the planet have a language in one form or another. But only a person has the ability to discuss things that do not exist in reality (gods, spirits, etc.).
In ancient people who lived about 70-30 thousand years ago, the brain was much larger than ours, by about 10-12%.
The appearance of a human of the species Homo Sapiens is the result of a completely random gene mutation. But further development is no longer a merit of biology, but sociology and culture.
Homo erectus lived on Earth for about a million years, 10 times more than we do, but they never created a culture or sophisticated tools.
Our brains still match the life of hunter-gatherers. In the industrial era, we are only a couple of centuries, in the agrarian era, 10 thousand years, and have been collectors for hundreds of millennia.
In fact, most of the tools used by the ancient people of the Stone Age were made of wood. But, of course, they have not reached our time - the stone is preserved better than wood.
The only animal that humans have tamed before agriculture was invented is the dog. Dogs have been with us for at least 15 thousand years.
Trade existed long before the agrarian revolution, but until we became farmers, it never occurred to anyone to trade or exchange food.
Survival in ancient times required the greatest intelligence, the stupid and inept simply died. With the advent of agriculture and industry, "fools" also had a chance to pass on their genes to others.
It is still unknown how the first ancient people were able to colonize Australia. But in terms of historical significance, this discovery is comparable to the landing on the moon.
Man is the only mammal that, in order to conquer the sea, did not need to grow flippers, my body shape and generally rebuild DNA.
It is man who is guilty of the extermination of almost the entire megafauna of the planet. Including mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, cave bears, giant sloths, etc.
The defining feature by which archaeologists identify ancient people is precisely the production, not the use of tools. Many monkeys know how to use sticks and stones, but only people can make them.
All other species of the genus Homo for two million years have been by no means at the top of the food chain, but rather somewhere in the middle. They could only hunt small animals, avoiding encounters with large predators.