The average wild mammal species claims about 64 square miles of Earth as its range. Homo sapiens occupies roughly 51 million. That gap is not a rounding error. It is the entire story of what makes us strange.
Charles Perreault, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins, has tried to do something that sounds straightforward but turns out to be genuinely difficult: measure that strangeness in evolutionary terms. His new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1 asks what it would have taken for a typical mammalian lineage to achieve the kind of planetary footprint our species has. The answer puts the role of culture into relief in a way that slogans about human uniqueness never quite manage.
To reach the geographic and ecological range Homo sapiens holds today through biological evolution alone, Perreault’s modeling suggests a lineage would have needed roughly 88 million years of divergence, more than 2,200 separate species, and a nearly four-order-of-magnitude spread in body mass. Our species has been around for approximately 300,000 years. We are one species. Our body mass variation, across all living humans, is trivial by any comparative mammalian standard.
Something else is doing the work.
