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shot-putters.” 17 Such a build is in keeping with a species that lives in cold climates; shorter limbs help conserve body heat.
    Neandertals had large brains—larger in an absolute sense, not necessarily relative to body size, than those of modern humans—and made complex stone tools that were probably used to hunt elk, deer, bison, and other large game animals. I say “probably” because, as with all conclusions drawn about early humans, this one is indirect. We find stone tools, and we find the bones of animals with marks on them from those tools. Did the Neandertals kill the animals, or could they have scavenged them from other predators? The consensus is that they were indeed killing the prey, but the data are not conclusive. Hunting or scavenging aside, the Neandertal life was not an idyllic one. Most Neandertals died before the age of fifty, and many of the adult skeletons show signs of diseases such as arthritis, gum disease, and deformed limbs.
    Anatomically modern humans, which first appeared on the scene about 100,000 years ago, not only looked different from the Neandertals; they had a more complex social life, using materials that came from far away to make their tools, which suggests that they traded with distant people. Unlike the Neandertals, they built shelters, and they created art and buried their dead. They certainly hunted game, but how much they relied on meat as opposed to plant foods is unclear, and almost certainly it varied depending on what part of the world they lived in—humans migrated from Africa throughout much of the rest of the world during the Paleolithic—and what time period is being considered. Bones and tools preserve much better than stems, seeds, or pits, but that does not mean that early humans relied more on meat than on other food sources.
    About 50,000 years ago, the fossil tools and other cultural accoutrements found in Europe underwent a marked change. Although people had looked like, well, people, for a long time, humans began to make more elaborate tools, clothing, and shelters, and at some point they began to use the symbolic communication that we call language. When and how language arose is, again, a hotly debated topic. Linguists are pessimistic that we will ever be able to trace the origin of modern language back further than 5,000 or at most 10,000 years, though it’s very likely that humans were using some form of symbolic spoken communication well before then.
    Indeed, the recent discovery of a gene called FOXP2 , which is present in virtually identical form in all humans, has led scientists to believe they may have uncovered an essential component in the evolution of language. FOXP2 occurs in many animals, including mice, and chimpanzees and gorillas possess identical forms of the gene. Defects in human FOXP2 are associated with an inability to use words correctly. Biologist Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, examined the small differences within the gene in chimps and gorillas, as well as in humans from several parts of the world, and discovered that FOXP2 changed rapidly after humans and chimpanzees split off from our common ancestor, perhaps because strong selection made the ability to use language advantageous. Pääbo then calculated that the current version of the gene appeared in the human lineage within the last 200,000 years. 18
    Although other species of Homo were living in Europe and Asia over 100,000 years ago, modern humans, Homo sapiens , moved out of Africa to populate the rest of the world only about 60,000 years ago. All of the people on Earth today are descended from a rather small number of Africans. This limited population of origin is probably why humans are much less variable genetically than are many other species, including our close relatives the chimpanzees. We tend to think we are terribly different from each other while every chimp in the zoo looks alike, but