Out of Eden Quotes

“Subsequently, verbal signals, some already present in the ‘innate’ primate repertory, were co-opted and developed into deliberate coded communication. Evolutionary pressures then promoted the development of the vocal apparatus and also of part of the brain immediately next to that responsible for gestures. This speech centre is often called Broca’s area.”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“I argue that language was that unique behaviour shared between the sister genera Homo and Paranthropus 2.5 million years ago which enabled them, cooperatively and flexibly, to survive the barren cycles of the Pleistocene ice epoch and thus drove their brain growth.”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“Our own species, Homo sapiens, was born over 170,000 years ago, out of what was nearly a human extinction in which the total population fell to an estimated 10,000 in a mother of all ice ages.”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“To know where we are going,
we have to know where we are;
to know that we have to know where we came from”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“If one were to rely solely on radiocarbon dating, the whole human world would seem to have started just over 40,000 years ago. Only”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“Admittedly there could have been interbreeding between archaic and modern Homo sapiens, but there is no convincing evidence for this in our male and female gene lines. So,”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“Genetic palaeontology brings clarity to a field of near-medieval confusion. The”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“Perhaps, as with cars, there was a law of diminishing evolutionary return, and it was no longer economical to build models with ever larger engines.”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“In Africa by 1.2 million years ago the brains of Homo rhodesiense had grown to within 6 per cent of the volume of modern humans. Around 300,000 years ago, the climate-driven brain-growth machine reached a plateau of size 11 per cent above that of today’s people. Since then our brains and bodies have got smaller. The”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“We differ from other large mammals, but not much from rodents, in the great variety of habitats we now occupy and in the population densities we have achieved. In”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“Since bears and coastal humans have an omnivorous diet that overlaps considerably, the bear story may be pointing us to the route that could have been taken by humans 12,000–15,000 years ago.”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“Before the LGM there were no brown bears in southern Canada, but they had spread across there by 13,000 years ago. Their mitochondrial group suggests that they arrived there, not from Alaska through the ice corridor, or by re-expansion from Alaska after the melt, but from refuges on west-coast islands. As”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“Were they like Star Trek’s Star-Base 9, polyglot,”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“A multidisciplinary synthesis is difficult enough if the disciplines are singing different songs, but if they are in different auditoriums . . .”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

“It turns out that, far from the world being a common genetic melting pot with massive to-and-fro prehistoric movements and mixings, the majority of the members of the modern human diaspora have conservatively stayed put in the colonies their ancestors first established. They”
― Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World