full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Spencer Wells: A family tree for humanity

Unscramble the Blue Letters


So the whole wlord was drying out. The sea levels were dropping. And Africa was turning to desert. The Sahara was much bigger then than it is now. And the human habitat was rdeuced to just a few small pockets, compared to what we have today. The ediencve from genetic data is that the human population around this time, rglohuy 70,000 years ago, crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals. We nearly went exinctt. We were hanging on by our fingernails.

And then something happened. A great illustration of it. Look at some stone tools. The ones on the left are from Africa, from around a million years ago. The ones on the right were made by Neanderthals, our distant csiouns, not our direct anesctros, livnig in Europe, and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. Now, at the risk of offending any paleoanthropologists or physical anthropologists in the audience, balcasliy there's not a lot of change between these two stone tool gopurs. The ones on the left are pretty siilmar to the ones on the right. We are in a period of long cultural stasis from a million years ago until around 60,000 to 70,000 yraes ago. The tool styles don't change that much. The evidence is that the human way of life didn't change that much during that period.

Open Cloze


So the whole _____ was drying out. The sea levels were dropping. And Africa was turning to desert. The Sahara was much bigger then than it is now. And the human habitat was _______ to just a few small pockets, compared to what we have today. The ________ from genetic data is that the human population around this time, _______ 70,000 years ago, crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals. We nearly went _______. We were hanging on by our fingernails.

And then something happened. A great illustration of it. Look at some stone tools. The ones on the left are from Africa, from around a million years ago. The ones on the right were made by Neanderthals, our distant _______, not our direct _________, ______ in Europe, and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. Now, at the risk of offending any paleoanthropologists or physical anthropologists in the audience, _________ there's not a lot of change between these two stone tool ______. The ones on the left are pretty _______ to the ones on the right. We are in a period of long cultural stasis from a million years ago until around 60,000 to 70,000 _____ ago. The tool styles don't change that much. The evidence is that the human way of life didn't change that much during that period.

Solution


  1. roughly
  2. basically
  3. world
  4. similar
  5. years
  6. evidence
  7. living
  8. groups
  9. cousins
  10. ancestors
  11. extinct
  12. reduced

Original Text


So the whole world was drying out. The sea levels were dropping. And Africa was turning to desert. The Sahara was much bigger then than it is now. And the human habitat was reduced to just a few small pockets, compared to what we have today. The evidence from genetic data is that the human population around this time, roughly 70,000 years ago, crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals. We nearly went extinct. We were hanging on by our fingernails.

And then something happened. A great illustration of it. Look at some stone tools. The ones on the left are from Africa, from around a million years ago. The ones on the right were made by Neanderthals, our distant cousins, not our direct ancestors, living in Europe, and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. Now, at the risk of offending any paleoanthropologists or physical anthropologists in the audience, basically there's not a lot of change between these two stone tool groups. The ones on the left are pretty similar to the ones on the right. We are in a period of long cultural stasis from a million years ago until around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. The tool styles don't change that much. The evidence is that the human way of life didn't change that much during that period.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
million years 4
ice age 4
african continent 3
common ancestry 3
alive today 3
whirlwind tour 2
big scientific 2
extinct species 2
skull shape 2
eighteenth century 2
human races 2
physical anthropologists 2
homo erectus 2
family tree 2
haploid genome 2
billion nucleotides 2
gave rise 2
stone tools 2
thousand years 2
african success 2
middle east 2
meat locker 2
national geographic 2
legacy fund 2


Important Words


  1. africa
  2. ancestors
  3. anthropologists
  4. audience
  5. basically
  6. bigger
  7. change
  8. compared
  9. cousins
  10. crashed
  11. cultural
  12. data
  13. date
  14. desert
  15. direct
  16. distant
  17. dropping
  18. drying
  19. europe
  20. evidence
  21. extinct
  22. fingernails
  23. genetic
  24. great
  25. groups
  26. habitat
  27. hanging
  28. happened
  29. human
  30. illustration
  31. individuals
  32. left
  33. levels
  34. life
  35. living
  36. long
  37. lot
  38. million
  39. neanderthals
  40. offending
  41. paleoanthropologists
  42. period
  43. physical
  44. pockets
  45. population
  46. pretty
  47. reduced
  48. risk
  49. roughly
  50. sahara
  51. sea
  52. similar
  53. small
  54. stasis
  55. stone
  56. styles
  57. time
  58. today
  59. tool
  60. tools
  61. turning
  62. world
  63. years