Gabriel Weber
Staff Writer
Like they say, “The winner takes it all,” and the loser goes extinct?
At 10:45 a.m. Friday in the Amphitheater, Ella Al-Shamahi closed out the Chautauqua Lecture Series for 2025, and its Week Nine theme of “Past Informs Present: How to Harness History.” Al-Shamahi is a National Geographic Explorer, paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist whose research has focused on Neanderthals.
Clips of her new show “Human” — premiering Sept. 18 on PBS — showed Al-Shamahi investigating the story of humanity’s evolution and opened up the lecture refuting the idea of humans’ predestined greatness.
“We were not the greatest species of human. We were not the fastest, not the strongest, not the smartest. We were just the latest in a long line of other humans. In fact, some would call us the underdog. And yet, in the space of just a few thousand years, look around — we are the only ones left and the most dominant form of life on this planet,” Al-Shamahi said. “How on earth did this happen? They say that history is written by the victors. What if the others didn’t just lose? What if they went extinct? This is our story, the story of Homo sapiens. But then again, folks, there really is no one left to refute it.”
Al-Shamahi finds two big problems with the image of human evolution typically presented to the public: the lack of women involved and a linear march forward that isn’t indicative of humanity’s fascinating nuance.
Al-Shamahi compares the world of our ancestors to The Lord of the Rings; when humans first turned up on the scene 300,000 years ago, we shared Earth with at least six other species of humans — but Al-Shamahi believes that number is just the tip of the iceberg. A team of archaeologists found an unexpected skeleton at least 70,000 years old on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi; while the skeleton belonged to an adult, it came up to only about 1 meter and 6 centimeters tall.
“This was a bomb shell of a discovery. (The adults) were the size of a 4-year-old child and lived on the island, only on this island in Indonesia with giant Komodo dragons, giant storks taller than me and giant rats,” Al-Shamahi said. “Just imagine it. In our world, there were once humans the size of penguins hunting elephants the size of cows. When I say it was like Lord of the Rings, I am not kidding. It was fantastical, only it was real.”
Archaeology is like a jigsaw puzzle in that there are different techniques like stones, fossils, DNA and bones to parse out where we come from geographically. The Out of Africa Theory maintains that humans first evolved in Africa, then migrated to other areas.
“It turns out that all of us from outside of Africa, we can trace our ancestry to about 10,000 people who left Africa 60,000 years ago. Only, we started as a species 300,000 years ago. So did we never leave Africa? Turns out we left Africa loads. We kept trying to leave Africa and populate the rest of the world — only it never took,” Al-Shamahi said. “We were constantly going locally extinct outside of Africa. It was like we hadn’t cracked the code of how to exist outside of Africa when so many of the other species had.”
Al-Shamahi referenced a time when Neanderthals and humans lived together at the same time under the same mountain in Israel in two different caves. Only one species went extinct.
“The only possible explanation in my mind for why we kept leaving Africa and disappearing, not being able to get a foothold, is that those other species were formidable,” Al-Shamihi said. “They were incredible competition. And that doesn’t suit us, does it? In the way we tell our story, we paint ourselves as the pinnacle of human evolution, as if we arrived on the scene and were immediately us. But actually, that’s not the case.”
When Al-Shamahi entered a Neanderthals’ cave and saw adult and children handprints on the walls, she immediately burst into tears. This could serve as evidence of art, or juvenile delinquents, or spirituality or even warnings — like the hand on stop signs.
“I personally think those handprints are all of the above. They’re the ground zero of all of it. The handprints with time become the Sistine Chapel, religion, Banksy. Those handprints, with time, become road signs,” Al-Shamahi said. “Isn’t it hard to not be impressed with these other human species? We have done them dirty in the way we have talked about them. In fact, there are a lot of paleoanthropologists today that will tell you, if we were to line up all of the other species of human and you were to ask who was going to make it, I will be honest with you, I would not be putting the money on us.”
However, something started to change about 100,000 years ago due to two big adaptations: a change in brain organization as seen by skull shape, and sheer numbers. The combination leads to cumulative culture, the idea that every single generation builds upon the previous generations’ science, art and technology.
“More people allows for more specialization. And what do you think fosters the kind of cooperation which our species is famous for? Something when you might not guess — tribalism. Tribalism fosters cooperation,” Al-Shamahi said. “Tribalism is all around us.”
Ritual is one way that humans cultivate shared meaning that bonds us to our tribes. This kind of bonding is a part of what makes leaving tribes so hard; Al-Shamahi recently started talking about her own experience leaving her creationist tribe when she found herself believing in evolution as a college student.
“That reaction that I had to leaving my tribe, crying my eyes out about it, was the correct response. As somebody who studies human evolution, that is a response that was baked into us,” Al-Shamahi said. “It’s not supposed to be easy to leave your tribe. It’s not supposed to be good. It’s supposed to be hard. Because your tribe keeps you alive.”
Dancing is another way humans bond with one another, even through social media trends. There was a study done where strangers participated in a silent disco, dancing together for just a few minutes; at the end, the dancers really believed the others were “their kind of people” — even imagining them to have the same political beliefs.
“If you really want to bring two people together, one of the best things you can do scientifically is to play music and get them to dance together. It’s incredible. Tribalism can be beautiful. It brings us together. But tribalism is marvelous for the in-group,” Al-Shamahi said. “It can be an absolute disaster for the out-group.”
When Al-Shamahi was looking to conduct a project on the Yemeni island of Socotra, she had significant problems getting there. A flight into the Yemen mainland would have landed the team in an Al-Qaeda stronghold, a private charter required high level clearance, and a cargo ship would have sailed through pirate waters.
“It is a tragedy for science and these places if we’re not doing research there. It’s what you call low-hanging fruit,” Al-Shamahi said. “This is the golden age, in my opinion, of paleoanthropologists; the discoveries being made by colleagues are mind boggling.”
The discovery of a tiny finger bone of a Neanderthal turned out to actually be a discovery of a whole new species of ancient humans — the Denisovans. The mutation that allows Tibetans to exist at extremely high altitudes actually comes from mixed-species breeding with the Denisovans.
There are many different theories as to why the other species of humans went extinct. Numbers were a big part of Homo sapiens’ ascendency as it meant a replenishing source in Africa and the ability to invent better technology.
“Numbers are a pretty unsexy answer to why we made it. I will give you one more answer. It goes back to us crossing to Australia. No other species of human had ever crossed to Australia. If you think about it, it is an insane act we did. Our ancestors looked out to an open ocean with no idea what was on the other side,” Al-Shamahi said. “Using rafts, because we hadn’t invented boats, they went out and sailed into the open ocean. It was an act, in my opinion, of pure madness, and it was not done by just a few people. It was done, we think, by hundreds of the first Australians.”
Al-Shamahi finds that time is who we are. It offers perspective on the true adaptability of humanity while contextualizing the balance that has historically been respected.
“I do not know what to make of our species. On the one hand, our ancestors were so inventive. They were so resilient and creative; it’s hard to not be impressed. It’s impossible to not be impressed. And we should be incredibly grateful for them,” Al-Shamahi said. “Truthfully, if they hadn’t been so successful, would we really be here? On the other hand, our success is so extreme that it constantly seems to be at the expense of those around us. Other human species and, as we can see today, other animals. I don’t know what to do with that.”
