We Evolved Pretty Quickly

Crash? You're throwing me here. You don't listen to Rush Limbaugh, do you?Who's this "we" that has a little more time left on the meter? Is it man? If so, then man's been around probably 200,000 years. You're not making civilized man his own species or anything, are you?That's still a short time, but it's seems pretty objectionable to me to suggest that our meter wasn't running until some humans in the Middle East built a city and started destroying the world. It's possible we had villages in South America 60,000 years ago, and it's certain we had them there 20,000 years ago. Why don't those people count?

Whew. That's great. I agree.

My reference was an NG article. I found a very similar article here. My statement was off by a little.It's only certain that we were in South America 12,000 years ago. That article and this one from Home: NOAA Ocean Exploration both seem to lean towards believing we were in South America 30,000 years ago. 60,000 years is mentioned as believed by unnamed somebodies.I think I was only off with "it's certain we had them there 20,000 years ago."If someone else wants to discuss it in a new thread, that's great, as I'm interested, but I have now exhausted the extent of my knowledge on the subject. :-)I don't want to retract my point, though, because I understand 200,000 years is the typically understood time that Homo Sapiens have been in existence and 120,000 or so is a minimum (one of our scientists may want to correct me on that point, but I'm pretty sure I'm not off by too much). It's just a technical point, but it seems worth remembering to me that our "civilized" days are only about 5% of our species' history.

Thanks for the info. I really don't think we're that off topic, anyway, because when we were building villages has to do with our evolution and the speed of it.I looked up civilization on dictionary.com before I used it, lol. I don't remember the exact definition, but it was close enough to "living in cities," that is what I used.One of these days I'm going to sit down and read a good book on pre-village life among humans--i.e., before we were building permanent or semi-permanent dwellings, maybe the 200kya-100kya range, and see what anthropologists think we were like.Or I guess I could wait for BBC to put out "Walking with Prehistoric Men," LOL. Oh, I guess I better not laugh. Maybe they already put that out, and I didn't notice.

Definitely true that hunter/gatherer was an easy assumption.You were irritated with DC85's reply?