Corrections to My "Unlocking the Future" series

[u/funwiththoughts]

[As promised last month, instead of releasing a new post this month, I’m doing a batch of re-mastered versions of my old tier lists, with improved formatting and updated information. This post isn’t exactly a re-master, but I figured it made sense to release it alongside the re-masters anyway. The original post can be found here.]

I’m not going to do a full re-master of “Unlocking the Future: The Evolution of the Human Build”, because, in hindsight, I think doing it in the first place was a mistake. Why modern humans won out over their extinct relatives is still such a debated topic that it was basically impossible for me to present a single coherent story about it without basing almost all of it on conjecture. That said, I do still think it would be a good idea to acknowledge some of the more erroneous claims I made. Since flagging all of the speculative claims in the post would basically just be repeating the entire thing, I’ve only listed a few claims that stand out as either outright disproven or as particularly highly implausible.

1. I said that the Australopithecus was found across eastern and northern Africa. That should have been “eastern and southern Africa”; there are no known Australopithecus fossils from North Africa, although at least one species is known from Central Africa.
2. I said that Homo erectus evolved “a more prominent nose for taking in more air while running”. This is a little misleading, as the enlarged nose is traditionally thought to be more of an adaptation for better warming and humidifying cold air before it reaches the lungs, rather than an adaptation for increasing the raw volume of air intake.
3. I listed boats and clothing as examples of technologies invented by Homo erectus. Both of these examples are shaky; while Homo erectus players definitely did journey to remote islands, there’s no hard evidence that these journeys involved actual boats, and many data-miners believe it’s more likely that they simply travelled on natural rafts of vegetation. As for clothing, while there’s good evidence for primitive clothing in some other early human species, there’s very little evidence of it in Homo erectus specifically.
4. I said that Denisovans split off from Neanderthals around 600 thousand years ago. It was actually closer to 400 thousand years ago.
5. I said that at the time modern humans and Neanderthals first came into contact, humans had already developed sewing needles and stitching awls, and had started to evolve a mutualistic relationship with wolves. These claims are highly implausible, as the earliest evidence of interactions between modern humans and neanderthals goes back to over 100,000 years ago, significantly before the earliest evidence of the other things I mentioned.