Why did humans explode?

Recently, I saw some netizens discussing why species explosions occur. Today, I will use a current example: the human explosion to talk to you about species explosions.

You may ask, with so many creatures on earth, why choose humans? Are humans representative? It is true that the expansion of the human population is definitely one of the most significant species explosions in the history of evolution in the past ten thousand years. Next, welcome everyone to join me to see how humans exploded.

01. Humans - a super fast-exploding species

It would be exciting if the 4.6 billion years of Earth's history were compressed into a 24-hour day.

The period of time that humans have appeared is just 0.1 seconds in the 24 hours of the Earth, which can be said to be a blink of an eye.

However, this species has rapidly expanded from a few thousand people to the current size of 7 billion, with a cumulative human size of nearly 106 billion, and has transformed the Earth, entering the Anthropocene.

This is definitely an important species in geological history.

Also, don't belittle yourself. Even from the perspective of biological species alone, it is very rare for a large mammal like humans to be so large in size and so widely distributed.

02. Earth from the perspective of aliens

If all human beings become extinct in the next second, and aliens come to Earth, they will be very curious.

First, the size of humanity is already significant.

Especially such a large group, it is definitely one of the most striking species they see after seeing the earth. In contrast, there are only 400,000 elephants, and there are quite a lot of cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens, but they are not as large as humans, and chickens are too beautiful but too small.

Secondly, the explosion of human beings can be called a miracle in the biological world.

The human population exploded too quickly. Ten thousand years ago, the human population may have been only tens of thousands, and this number may have lasted for millions of years, so aliens may hardly see the existence of ancient humans.

However, such a rapid growth rate within ten thousand years is truly a miracle.

03. Traditional factors of human outbreaks?

When we talk about grand narratives, there are often a series of large descriptions.

For example, a huge change in climate? However, over the past million years, the climate has not changed dramatically like an icy planet.

For example, geological upheavals? In fact, the Earth has been very stable overall over the past millions, or even tens of millions, of years (the kind that doesn't involve continental upheavals).

As for the composition of the atmosphere, it is also relatively constant.

The aliens were very confused. What was going on?

04. Some human traits have not undergone major biological changes

Maybe we start to think, have human biological traits changed dramatically? This is a good idea. After all, when we interpret many changes in ancient organisms, biological traits are very important. For example, the appearance of eyes, the appearance of hard bones, etc. (which made a huge contribution to the Cambrian period and left fossils).

So what major changes have had an impact on human development to this day?

Walking upright is a distinctive feature, but humans have been walking upright for at least millions of years, and during these long millions of years, humans have been a very ordinary animal.

Changes in brain capacity are another characteristic of humans that can be clearly distinguished, but changes in human brain capacity have also been happening for millions of years.

It is difficult to explain the huge changes in ten thousand years.

05. Huge changes at a small scale

So if you count from Homo erectus to now, millions of years later, 99% of the time, humans haven't had any significant population expansion.

But it is the huge changes in that 1% of time that are caused. And in that 1% of time, there are actually almost no huge physiological changes.

Today, we believe that the great changes in human beings are due to the birth of civilization since the agricultural era, the use of agriculture to domesticate plants, and even the development of industry, which has led to a great change in the scale of human beings. For example, the introduction of corn and potatoes directly caused the scale of human beings to soar.

But if you look at these things from a geological, environmental, or even evolutionary perspective, you can hardly find any reasons.

Therefore, you will see that many of the factors you think are not necessarily the direct causes. Even the big changes you see may not necessarily explain the changes of a species.

And in turn, there is an overall explanation: the accumulation of advantages.

They have some advantages that cannot be demonstrated in the early stages of their appearance until a certain opportunity arises, and then this species explodes.