The world we live in feels normal, ordinary.

It feels like this is just how humans exist and always existed.

But, it’s not.

Never before have we humans lived in a world as sophisticated and engineered to our needs as today.

Giving us the luxury to forget about ourselves and not worry about survival.

Food, shelter, security – all of this is, more or less, taken for granted.

But we’re a special few; for more than 99.99% of human history, life was completely different.

And there’s no such thing as just one human history.

Our story begins 6 million years ago, when the tribe of hominini split and our relationship with the apes ended.

2.8 million years ago, the genus of homo, the first humans, emerged.

We like to think about ourselves as the only humans, but this is far from the truth.

When we, homo sapiens sapiens, came into existence 200,000 years ago, there were at least six other human species around.

Cousins of comparable intelligence and ability, which must have been incredibly scary, kind of like living with aliens.

Some of them were very successful.

Homo erectus, for example, survived for 2 million years.

Ten times longer than modern humans have existed.

The last of the other humans disappeared around 10,000 years ago.

We don’t know what caused them to die out.

Modern humans have at least a few percent of Neanderthal and other human DNA, so there was some mixing, but certainly not enough to be a merger between species.

So we don’t know if our cousins went away because they lost the battle over resources, or because of a series of minor genocides.

Either way, only we remain.

Back to the beginnings of humanity.

2.8 million years ago, early humans used tools, but did not make a lot of progress for nearly 2 million years.

Until they learned to control fire.

Fire meant cooking, which made food more nutritious, which contributed to the development of our brain.

It also produced light and warmth, which made days longer and winters less gruesome.

On top of that, it not only scared predators away, it could also be used for hunting.

A torched wood or grassland provided small animals, nuts and tubers that were pre-roasted.

From 300,000 years ago, most of the different human species lived in small hunter-gatherer societies.

They had fire, wood and stone tools, planned for the future, buried their dead, and had cultures of their own.

But most importantly, they spoke to each other.

Probably in a kind of proto-language, less complex than ours.

If we had a time machine, how far would we be able to go back, steal a few babies and raise them today without anyone noticing that they’re a bit different?

There is much debate.

Anatomically, modern humans emerged 200,000 years ago, but probably 70,000 years is as far as we could travel back and still snatch a behaviourally modern human.

Before that, the babies would probably lack a few crucial gene mutations necessary to build a brain with modern language and abstract thinking abilities.

At some point, around 50,000 years ago, there was an explosion in innovation.

📚 Vocabulário

🗣️ Expressões importantes

“That’s taken for granted.”
→ Isso é considerado garantido / algo que temos como certo.

“Far from the truth.”
→ Longe da verdade.

“Kind of like…”
→ Algo como… / mais ou menos como…

“On top of that…”
→ Além disso.

“Either way…”
→ De qualquer forma.

“At some point…”
→ Em algum momento.

“There is much debate.”
→ Há muito debate / existe muita discussão sobre isso.

🧠 Compreensão

Responda em inglês, sem consultar a transcrição:

1. Why does the narrator say that modern human life is unusual?
2. How long ago did the first humans emerge?
3. Were Homo sapiens the only human species?
4. How long did Homo erectus survive?
5. What happened to the other human species?
6. Why was controlling fire so important?
7. What were hunter-gatherer societies like?
8. Why does the narrator mention a “time machine”?
9. According to the video, what changed around 50,000 years ago?

✍️ Writing

Imagine you could travel 50,000 years into the past.

Write 5–8 sentences in English answering:

What would you expect to see, and how would life be different from your life today?

Tente utilizar pelo menos 3 palavras ou expressões do vocabulário acima.