I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis.

This object was made by a hominid ancestor, Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, between 50,000 and 100,000 years before language.

The Homo studiosus the studying man.

The Looming Death of Homo Economicus

But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens.

We are Homo duplex, as Durkheim explained.

From left to right, we've got Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Australopithecus now called Paranthropus boisei, the robust australopithecine. Three extinct species, same place, same time.

Homo erectus made the same tool for 30,000 generations.

Suddenly humans show up Homo erectus big, old melon head.

Durkheim even called us Homo duplex, or two level man.

Because this is exactly what our ancestors, the Homo erectus, did.

Even Sub Saharan Africans of today show traces of a distinct episode of interbreeding within the last 50,000 years. In this case, the source may have been as yet unknown remnants of the ancient species Homo heidelbergensis a direct ancestor of both Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis surviving somewhere in southern Africa.

The earliest members of our lineage, the genus Homo, were darkly pigmented.

He actually coined the term Homo sapiens it means wise man in Latin.

And we are Homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection, as Darwin explained.

Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the what level.

These Acheulian hand axes they're named after St. Acheul in France, where finds were made in 19th century have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, almost everywhere Homo erectus and Homo ergaster roamed.

I mean, it's self awareness that separates Homo sapiens from earlier instances of our mankind.

It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens.

Why didn't Homo erectus evolve into separate species, or sub species rather, human races around the world?

And here is a skull of a Homo erectus, which I just pulled off the shelf there.

Yes, indeed, the old man is there, as is this famous pen drawing of the Homo Vitruvianus.

So, Homo erectus was the first human ancestor to leave Africa and begin its spread across the globe.

One is an Acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago of the kind made by Homo erectus.

Two million years ago at Lake Turkana, Homo erectus, one of our human ancestors, actually lived in this region.

For example, according to Nobel laureate Robert Fogel, medical and nutritional advances since the Industrial Revolution have accelerated and directed the evolutionary process, making modern humans a fundamentally different species from Homo sapiens. In 2011, bio technology investor Juan Enriquez coined the term Homo evolutis to denote this shift.

What's missing is that we are Homo duplex, but modern, secular society was built to satisfy our lower, profane selves.

Now the question is, we Homo sapiens today are in a position to decide about the future of our planet, possibly more.

I could relate to this Homo erectus skeleton very well, because I was the same age that he was when he died.

I'm saying we are Homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred.

If you look at our ancestors, the Neanderthals and the Homo erectus, our immediate ancestors, they're confined to small regions of the world.

And that's the reason why, as you look at the hominid fossil record, erectus, and heidelbergensis, and floresiensis, and Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, all overlap.

Just to put this in terms of generations, because people do find it hard to think of time, Homo erectus left Africa 90,000 generations ago.

In short, mainstream economics and the concept of homo economicus recognizes only half of what makes us human. We are undoubtedly motivated by self interest.

After all, living in a world that assumes we are homo economicus can encourage selfish habits. Fortunately, research suggests that such habits can be broken.

And our ancestors lived in that game park, but were just the minorities. They were not as successful and as widespread as the Homo sapiens that we are.

And a Homo evolutis brings together these three trends into a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.

We are the species called Homo sapiens sapiens, and it's important to remember that, in terms of our place in the world today and our future on planet Earth.

Except, of course, what's interesting about this is that we can't be sure how that idea was conveyed, because the Homo erectus that made these objects did not have language.

And Homo sapiens are one small leaf on a very extensive Tree of Life, which is densely populated by organisms that have been honed for survival over millions of years.

We began to find limb bones we found finger bones, the bones of the pelvis, vertebrae, ribs, the collar bones, things that had never, ever been seen before in Homo erectus.

But when I was 12, as I was in this picture, a very exciting expedition was in place on the west side, when they found essentially the skeleton of this Homo erectus.

Well, shortly afterwards, members of his species started to move northwards out of Africa, and you start to see fossils of Homo erectus in Georgia, China and also in parts of Indonesia.

Sure enough, their tools were more complicated than those of Homo erectus, but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species, the Neanderthals, lived in Eurasia.

Now if we make some guesses about how long Homo erectus lived, what their generation time was, that's about 40,000 generations of parents to offspring, and other individuals watching, in which that hand axe didn't change.