Take a look at the second installment of 23andMe’s Human Prehistory 101 series.  23andMe’s creative team (led by chief illustrator Ariana Killoran) recently released “Out of (Eastern) Africa.”  With this new installment, we pick up where the previous video left off, when humans were starting to take their first tentative steps beyond the shores of Africa and into the unknown.

We begin this second episode around 60,000 years ago, when early human groups were exploring Africa for food and other resources. Just a few thousand years later, a few people journeyed even farther, heading east into the Arabian Peninsula, Asia, Europe and beyond. The common theme here? Things were changing for our human ancestors, who had previously stayed relatively confined to their homeland but now they were on the move. Around the time they first set foot in Asia, humans in Africa began creating sophisticated stone tools and art the likes of which had never been seen before.

As humans ventured into uncharted territory, they may have encountered other species who bore some resemblance to themselves.  In Asia, they may have run into Homo erectus, a distant relative that had journeyed into Asia from Africa almost 2 million years earlier.  In Europe humans likely came across the Neanderthals, another related species that had been braving the cold northern latitudes of Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years.

Our story continues as we see where various human populations settled over the next several thousand years, and gives us a peek at the difficulties that awaited them as the harsh Ice Age approached. Subsequent episodes will document how our human ancestors survived the harsh Ice Age conditions and how the innovation of agriculture and development of language laid the groundwork for the genetic diversity we see today.  Enjoy this latest installment and stay tuned for future episodes of Human Prehistory 101!

ShareThis

When 23andMe launched last November, we set out to make genetics accessible to everyone – not just the experts.  So we created a series of education videos called Genetics 101. These videos educated viewers on the basics of genetics:  What is a gene, what is a SNP, how genes are inherited from generation to generation, and a host of other useful topics.

But understanding your genetic code is only part of what the 23andMe Personal Genome Service^TM offers its customers.  We also want our customers to understand their genetics in the context of human evolution:  How did our species evolve, how did we come to populate the globe, and how can we account for the diversity of peoples living today on our planet?

Those questions are the basis for a new series of videos, dubbed Human Prehistory 101. Using the same creative team as with Genetics 101 (led by chief illustrator Ariana Killoran), we developed a series of videos that tell the human story, from the birth of our species to present day.  The first installment, the Prologue, was released last week on 23andMe’s website.

The Prologue sets the stage for the human story, beginning with our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee.  We then see how the earliest humans lived in Africa nearly 200,000 years ago, and follow some of our fossil ancestors such as Homo erectus — who ventured into Asia long before we did.  We also learn that our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, were not so very different from early humans; they cared for their sick and even buried their dead.

This installment will soon be followed by others, each tackling a key chapter in the evolution of our species.  Future videos will explain how and when humans ventured out of Africa for the first time, how they survived the Last Ice Age, and how they came to populate so many parts of the world. So be sure to stay tuned for more Human Prehistory 101!

ShareThis