Three mysteries of human evolution

Three mysteries of human evolution

Modern  scientists has given  us a preety good understanding of some crazy stuff like how the sun works and even how  the universebgot started but it turns out where's lot we don't know about a subject that you'd think we'd br preety familar with bybnow ourselvessure we've got a rough idea of how we got where but there's still some big mysteries to unravel if we ever want to understand how we become human walking an two legs is so characteristically human you think we'd  know why we do it but the truth is we're still not sure darwin said bipedalism give us the advantage by freeing our hands to make and use to us but fossile suggest that can't be the oldest tools data to arround 2.6 million years ago but our homid ancestors started walking upright almost 2 million years before that so if not the free hands than what some think walking upright allowed early hominins to better spot predators otherpoint out that walking on two legs allows us to travel farther faster giving us larger territor's to roam it doesn't have to be one or the other though walking upright may have had a whole set of advantages that gave our ancestors the edge now walking on two legs has obvious advantages but being naked does not nearly all mammals have fur and for good reason we spend a lotbof energy heating ourselves and we don't want to go to waste so what gives one idea is that we lost our fur during a phase of our evolution where we lived mainly in water like whales and dolphines as intriguing as this aquatic ape hypothesis in there's not much in the way of fossil evidence to support it another thoery says we lost our fur when our ancestor ditched the forests to hang out on the savana arround 1.7 million years ago over heating would have been a real danger to thosewith less fur might have had  a better shot at survival but plenty of animals on the savana kept their fur so it's clear this mystery yet to be solved being naked and bipedal  is cool and all but what really sets us apart is our upgradedbgrey matter our brains are twice as heavy as you might expect for an ape of our size so why did we get the smarts while other open did notbsomething it's due to a single mutation that weakended our ancestors bite muscles this reduced the force across our skull allowing them to ballon out filling with brain more brains means we could better find in ration food and invent new tecnology but the biggest driver of big brains was most likely ourselves keeping tabs on your place in the social structure would seem to rewardvthose with more brain power in fact fossil indicates that proxies for social pressure like group size and living density rather than environment pressure were more closely associated with larger brain in our ancestors the thing is though we homesapiens are not the only animal to walk on two legs lose our fur or have decent -sized brains for tens of thousands of years we walked the planet with at least four other type of hominins and we all shared rougly similar traits there new extinct but we remain why this could be the biggest mystery of all it's only getting more mysterious as we find more and more member of the hominin family tree so it's likely wall still be pondering why we are the way we for along time to come