Ancient

Anthropologist Margaret Mead was once asked by a student, "What is the earliest sign of civilization?" The student anticipated that she might mention a grinding stone, a clay pot, or maybe a weapon. After giving it some thought, Margaret Mead said the words, "A healed femur." The longest bone in the body, connecting the hip and knee, is the femur. A fractured femur heals after roughly six weeks of rest in communities without the advantages of modern treatment. A femur that has healed indicates that someone took care of the injured person, hunted and collected for them, stayed with them, and provided both physical protection and company until the damage healed. Mead clarified that no mended femurs are discovered in areas where the survival of the fittest, or the law of the jungle, governs. 

Archaeologists have found a new human ancestor in the Philippines who was under three feet tall, making our family tree even more tangled and serving as a reminder of how little we actually know about the evolution of our species. Following the island of Luzon, where it was found during an excavation at Callou Cave, the new hominid has been called Homo luzonensis.

Archaeological findings about ancient human ancestors have been abundant on the island of Luzon. Last year, for example, 700,000-year-old stone tools used by human ancestors were discovered, which altered our understanding of hominid migration from Eurasia into Southeast Asia by roughly half a million years. Many have drawn parallels of the latest discovery to the dwarf-like human ancestor Homo floresiensis discovered on the nearby Indonesian island of Flores in 2004. This controversial “hobbit” ancestor of ours sparked intense debate as to whether it was a direct or distinctly separate ancestor, and now luzonensis finds itself in a similar debate. 

Philosophers, scientists, and regular, inquisitive people have all been fascinated by the chronology of human existence across the millennia. Of course, the well-known story of Adam and Eve exists, but were they indeed the first people to set foot on the planet? An increasing amount of evidence indicates that intelligent creatures other than contemporary humans did not initially inhabit our planet.

There are groups of people who think that pre-Adamites—humans or other intelligent entities who lived on Earth before Adam—actually existed. These groups include Christians, conspiracy theorists, alien researchers, evolutionists, and more.