Title reads like Simon can consciously resume evolution as a human and is only considering doing so

Such a truly important point to make at 3.26: evolution is about adaptation to existing environmental conditions. Love it Simon.

the dot matrix tree is an excellent example on how to show spciation. Well done sir

One of my favourites so far. …'behaviour can't be fossilised'... - my mind went off in so many directions. Great work. Your delivery is ASMR like and the language so very accessible.

Dude. I’m 38 years old. I’ve been obsessed with anthropology and paleoanthropology, modern humans and evolution my whole life, and this video just taught me so much. Thanks for taking the time to do this!

A subject I've found endlessly fascinating since I was a spotty 70's teenager. I was already subscribed to your channel for your Enlish language medieval content. You're knowledge base is even more impressive than I had realised this video is thought provoking & very fresh in it's approach to such a wonderfully evocative subject. More content like this in future please!

is no one going to talk about the picture of his pal toby

That last painting! Extraordinary. I felt like the eyes were looking into my soul.

Simon's beginning to look like a pirate.

I really like the title of the video, it seems like an invitation, but also clearly says what the video is, and is about.

I've been needing another Simon Roper video. Great stuff!!!!

I always try to be conscious of conformation bias, but today I learned about preservation bias...

I love how you're going down the same rabbit hole as I did. From language to archaic language to the origins of language to human evolution.

"Any animal can think something that's not true in our opinion." ... That reminds me of Billi the "talking" cat - and also other housecats - who seem to assume that humans can control the weather. If they want to go outside and it rains, they complain to their human and seem to demand the human makes the rain go away.

Dibs on "The Human Chimpanzee Divergence" as a band name

Can’t wait for the hunter gatherer video!

11:41 you painted that- you’re an artist Simon?

really, you calmness makes your videos very likable, even more so when presenting a well presented topic

Can you do a video on how laughing developed as an important way to communicate (and crying, by the same token)? Loved this video btw.

Absolutely love your content!

Great vid Simon ! Straight forward and easy to understand

My favorite subject to learn about and you do it in such a concise and engaging way, thank you!

What an absolutely outstanding video. Well done! More of this please!

Thanks for the heads-up about the syntax video at the end, I absolutely would have missed that and it would have been a shame! Very interesting video as always, and I really like your style of presentation!

Excellent, thoughtful video Simon, thanks.

thank you simon. love these videos

Love your style, looking forward to the next one

I wish I had had your presentation to use with my Senior IB biology students. You make many great points.

This is so interesting, thank you for creating this content

another great video, thank you Simon

Yet another fascinating video Simon.

Simon Roper, keep going mate. Love your videos Fascinating incite to the past.

I enjoyed this tremendously, thank you.

Love this departure from the usual fare!

Excellent video once again Simon!

Amazing video Simon...great info

Really enjoy your videos, Simon

I'd love to watch more videos on stuff like this as well as the linguistics videos. This is really interesting!

Very interesting video, thank you for this Simon

Its refreshing to listen to you, since you don't proclaim to know the absolute truth, but show differentiated research

i loved this, and i look forward to more of your thoughts on this, and related, topics.

superb talk. Absolutely wonderful, informative and paradigm expanding. Thank you very much, from a very impressed writer in sunny Manchester :)

For some strange reason I watched the whole video. You're good at this.

Re: disposal of the dead. It is noticeable that there is a recent trend regarding "lost at sea" whereby people in some cases wish their drowned relatives to be brought to the surface for burial or cremation on land (e.g. sinking of a fishing boat). 'Buried at sea' was once thought of an acceptable fate.

This is so interesting! Love it! Simon, please do more videos on Evolution!

Super interesting :) love your content and your interests

Wonderful stuff. Enjoyed watching thanks!

Love your channel! I am from Kazakhstan and here I don´t have any resources to have such knowledge as you do. But thank the Internet, and may God bless the souls of people who invented it)))

Excellent video, I really enjoyed listening.

I am impressed by the fantasy art associated with these vids they become more modern with every episode. Once upon a time far far away.My daughter loved the three bears.

Really fascinating . Thank you

Thanks Simon excellent explanation

I'm just about to finish my MPhil in human evolution at Cambridge, and I did my undergrad dissertation on the origins of language and symbolic thinking at UCL. Feel free to message me if you need any more material, I've got loads of interesting references.

Fantastic video, Simon. Some lovely art presented here, I'd be fascinated to hear your thoughts on the quandaries of artistic reconstructions of the subjects of anthropological and archaeological study, be they illustrations, sculptures or dioramas. I agree with you that making some kind of effort to create images and impressions of these things helps hugely to expand the ways we think about them, yet I'm always left wondering in which ways the artist may have missed the mark, and how much it matters if they did. I then think that there seems to be little way of knowing for sure, at least until new evidence comes along.

Love the shirt! You are rockin 1971!!💖💖

Classic Roper, wouldn’t be the same without roadworks, cars, planes... Good stuff Simon 👍

very interesting video... thanks Simon

Excellent. Very interesting video (and I could hear no noise)

I love your painting!

Very informative. Please keep posting

We're often blinkered and sometimes by ourselves.

Another fascinating video.

Really fascinating, Simon, thanks for lending your mind & knowledge in creating this bridge for many of us. You've some good painting skills there, too, did you use a model to some degree? How d'ya reckon those people shaved & clipped their moustaches? (Just being cheeky, this last!) Thanks too, for all the great links! 🐵🦧🦍🧔👍

Really good. Look forward to more.

So interesting - think I'm going to have to rewatch this one to fully shake my ideas into new patterns! It's a little scary how much "pop anthropology/paleontology" (along with pop psychiatry!) influences majorly important parts of our collective thinking? Particularly in terms of what constitutes "civilisation", how we relate to nature, and what group behaviors are considered inherent vs learned... BTW really like the long hair + beard/mo look for you, Simon, it really seems to suit face shape etc! 👍

Just the most perfect lovely video ... thanks Simon. Thank you. I am (through experience) naturally wary of KZfaq videos with titles like this ... you have categorically not followed that format.

excellent video, thank you for the information S imon

Just as we were geo centric in the past, we tend to be, understandably, species centric now. Simon reminds us that this is just a view and that this can be revised at any time, by greater knowledge and by any number of external phenomena. Solar flares are top of my random phenomena list. The Carrington event of 1859 is a good starting point to clarify our centric assumptions. By 1859, we had only just established a global, telegraph system! And then.......? A version of that graph of our human origins with the crowning glory of city dwellers at it's apex, may well be rediscovered as a petroglyph on some cave wall at some remote time in the future. Keep up the good work Simon.

i hope many students find your video channel

AH! Thank you Simon! This video so succinctly and eloquently targets the dangerous misconceptions that undergird the the """lay""" understanding of evolution. Going to save this one for the next time someone comes at me with some bullshit about "the direction of progress"

Simon Roper what a cool guy good man thanks for the video

I absolutely loved this! Thank you.

Cheers Simon

Superb video, great art and a nice shirt! If I was to guess the brand by the naked eye, I'd say Jenson and Samuel. You may like some of Joe Browns shirt offerings as they also do paisleys and distinctive patterns (I wear 'em myself!).

A splendid video to listen to with my morning toast & the dawn chorus starting up. More please! I think a short pause when new text come up. Just long enough to read it. Even after being online since '97 I can't properly absorb text if I'm listening closely to the spoken word. I hear kids who've grown up online can do this. I'm sceptical until I see experimental results. Does comprehension suffer if doing both at the same time? I'd put my money on Yes! Great subject though. I enjoyed it.

Very logical, rational, and well put together presentation.

Fantastic video

Lovely Paisley shirt Simon. I have the same one in green

At 9:54 the chimps are just trying to play a game of Wall Ball, but it's kinda difficult to find walls and balls in the jungle. So competitive "Tree Rocks" is there next best option.

This is quality content.

Will your video on hunter-gatherers be specifically about Western Hunter-Gatherers? Your picture at 16:55 reminded me of the lost phenotypes of those populations and the challenges they may have faced with the arrival of farming populations from Anatolia. I always found the idea of these lifestyles clashing together absolutely fascinating. Keep up the good work young one

Thanks for this video. I'm not convinced by the theory of human evolution - but your student-beard look is beginning to persuade me again.

Great content.

the most interesting thing in this video (not because it's uninteresting but because i already know this stuff) is how you mentioned that our ancestors lived in grasslands and that this is why our fossils were preserved so well. this seems like it's possibly a similar error to the idea that our ancestors lived in caves, because we found most of their bones preserved in caves, when really it was not the case that they especially lived in caves, it was just that the ones that did had their remains preserved more.

Can’t believe I’m crying about the chimpanzee stepmother 😥

nice stuff my lad

12:33 “Some people keep them and socially interact with them...” What’s that, Mother? A new guest?

Thank you for this infinitely interesting video!!!!! Need more of this thinking of how to think about evolution....so many variables that linear thinking leading to the sometimes narrow concepts shouldn't be standard. So much of the unknown not surviving outside of stone, bone, and rare art...filling in the blanks isn't easy. I love this video.

Simon should make more videos like this

The hallway metaphor in the opening to TV's "Get Smart" might be a good metaphor for speciation (removing the humorous part, perhaps)?

Love your channel man

hey simon. do more stuff youre great.

Some chimps perform ceremonies, sitting around with rocks on their shoulder or head, then storing said rocks together when they're done. It's a 'religio' (in the sense of 'bonding') and rite of passage (as the young become proficient). The 'understanding' of rock to us, is a literal 'standing under' rock to them; in either species, thinking is something hard.

Che Guevara has got back in shape. He can save Bolivia easily now.

This linear trajectory idea is also present in historiography where it’s called whiggishness and is equally obfuscating.

Some ppl think science don't be like it do, but it do.

Is the black African looking "Palaeolithic European person" realistic? My understanding is that caucasians evolved fair skin to absorb more sunlight in the northern hemisphere. People would move north, by a little bit, and their skin would become paler, then they would move north by a little bit again, and so on until they acclimated and looked like modern Europeans.

I just think we were always the way are are now, but just have multiple civilizations that rise and fell for millions and millions of years. I was a 6 ,000 believer but again who is to say we restarted anew 6,000 years ago after a crisis.

Simon your painting looks nice. Those that say you got the look wrong well that is there perceptions no one know what they looked like...

thank you for doing this. I'm always surprised how un-common it is, as knowledge, and so important for re-contextualizing our "place" on earth. & i think you are more qualified to discuss it than you think. i remember as a student trying to find a functional definition for the concept of speciation, & the best one (for the question I had in mind at the time) seemed to be the biological concept. but the answer depends on the context of the question, and in any case, speciation is a concept only our overevolved brains care about. evolution don't care. i would think ... maybe a good definition of a "species" is "an organism able to successfully (1) adapt to its environment (2) long enough to reproduce (that is, regardless whether the reproduction itself is successful). bkz environment is always changing, it's always environment that drives evolution, so really organism can't be considered separate from environment: then you realize what "species" is is a functional phase of organism-enviroment. there is deep complexity, and in order to adapt to the environment we are now so complexly influencing, we need to increase the complexity of our thinking. thanks for touching on so many aspects of this fascinating, crucial topic. Great bridge between archae/anthro & linguistics! p.s. as you're discussing Naledi, the difficulty of accessing the location - it occurs to me, i wonder if they had their children help dispose of their dead. "Holmes, ... a child has done this horrid thing." Doyle, "Sign of the Four"