Our Homo Sapiens Superior Seeking Gene

What makes us so special?  What gave us modern humans the edge to beat out the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and all the other strains of Homo erectus, leaving us, Homo sapiens, the only human form left standing? For that is what happened: Every other line of human descent expired along the way. We, who emerged on the African scene a mere fifty thousand years ago and then moved north into the Middle East and beyond, somehow managed to outlast and replace the lot of them.[1]

It is this question that first caught my attention when listening to an interview with Johannes Krause,[2] who co-wrote the German book Hybris (translated edition Hubris).[3] I then got the book and discovered a step-by-step tale of prehistoric humankind that left me in awe of archaeogenetics. Through modern gene technology, it is incredible how far back we can go with even the tiniest speck of bone to understand who came when and who is linked to whom across the globe.

As Hubris tells it, this profound and overarching question – who are we? – has a very small answer, so small that it constitutes less than 0.1% of our microscopic genome, which is the sum total of genetic difference between us and the Neanderthals. We were 99.9% genetically the same. Even more remarkably, if you look at specific genes, there were fewer than 100 genes that differed between the Neanderthals and modern humans.[4] Somewhere in that sliver of variation lay the difference between us striving and thriving vs. other humans that hit an evolutionary dead-end.

But what is it that really sets us apart, what exactly is in that 0.1% or less than 100? The differences are visible to the eye, but we can only speculate about what they mean. Of course, in speculating, we are using one of the very distinctions that kept us going, that positioned us to avoid predators, pursue prey, survive hardship, and create advantage – some degree of brain power, some function of intelligence, some factor from one or more favorable mutations that were unique to us.

This is where it gets especially interesting. Already for early humans, as evidenced by DNA found in the worldwide trail of bones, “the wanderlust was boundless.” (Hubris, p. 53) Says Krause: “So what we can see is that modern humans are extremely expansive in their nature. We are expanding very fast. We basically don’t tolerate, sometimes, borders – like to a degree where it’s almost suicidal.” Homo sapiens just kept spreading from place to place, even across 3000 kilometers of ocean in times before ships. “What kind of drives people to go on some of those kinds of crazy adventures to discover new land? I mean, even sitting in a rocket that shoots you to the moon – why would someone do that? But we are doing those things. We are adventurous in some ways.”

And along with that, Krause explains, we are very culturally diverse and adaptable, living in every imaginable ecosystem, exhibiting great plasticity, developing complex ways of life, including food production and plant and animal domestication, along with a devastating ability to claim and shape nature (Hubris, pp. 84-85). About 10,000 years ago, no other strain but us – something uniquely in our genetic make-up – propelled us to create and move, compete and excel.[5]

This tendency toward expansion and exploration is both geographical and intellectual. “We’re really driven by finding out new stuff, kind of basic research, trying to understand, in our case, where humans came from … which is largely driven by curiosity. … But you can also never know what your discoveries, your basic science and insights might actually generate in the future,” Krause emphasizes, thus defending the value of science, while also justifying his own work. Or as interviewer Jerusalem Demsas puts it: Homo sapiens appears to have a “kind of desire to explore and research and find new things, even if there’s not a very clear, obvious reason to do it.”

So, here is the place where I can point to Sayyida Salme’s life and say: See! This was not just a special case – it was human nature to open herself up to new experiences, to seek new ways and horizons, to go beyond. In fact, she grew up in an age of explorers and, as I point out, was an explorer herself: “At the same time that explorers from the West were 'discovering' the East, including East Africa, she uniquely became the reverse: a probing and insightful explorer from the East (including as an Arab) of the West.” (Letters, p. vi) Then again, that she did so as a woman was, indeed, outside the norm[6] and in many ways ahead of her time.

Sayyida Salme had her reasons, too, enough to cross strict boundaries in systems and institutions as much as geography. (Memoirs, p. 232) What inspired her to leave the island; what was she looking for? Her writings are noticeably spare on the subject (her chapter “Great Transformations” is the shortest in the Memoirs), but it may be an age-old story. Her circumstances point to a dead-end of sorts. Both parents had passed away, her family relations were fraught, marriage prospects were probably fading, her writing skills were likely frowned upon, opportunities to be part of the royal government were nil, and princess life was ever so restrictive. An alternative may have been welcome. And then she fell in love; never underestimate the power of love.

Notably, too, it was not just once that Sayyida Salme had to muster the courage to move on. Even after her first drastic shift, her life in Germany became a veritable migration from place to place, as her descent into poverty squeezed her means. She found herself asking, time and time again:

But where should I point my feet to find what I was looking for? (Letters, p. 73)

And yet, for all the tragedy and trauma that followed her fateful breach, Sayyida Salme’s leap into the unknown let her beat the odds. She outlived every one of her dozens of siblings. She raised three children, whose prospering family branches now spread across multiple continents. She recorded her experiences and observations for perpetuity, with name recognition today even beyond her Sultan half-brothers. That restless gene made life hard, but served her well.

And so it is writ large. Bold moves, the impulse to venture forth, that superior seeking gene seems to have been the ticket to Homo sapiens’ success all along.

Coda: Why then is the book titled “Hubris”? For all the success we have had to date in conquering our environment and vanquishing our competition, the authors flag that our endemic rapaciousness now threatens our own destruction. “We remain to this day a product of the classic predator-prey relationship that determines almost all evolutionary processes and from which humans have up to this point emerged victorious. Now that our dominion spans the entire planet, we find ourselves face to face with the final enemy: ourselves. … Homo hubris appears to be incapable of accepting the limits of growth. … Who, if not Homo hubris, is up to the task of protecting us from ourselves?” (Hubris, p. 204, 206, 210)

That question may be the true lesson of this archaeogenetic history.

Let history surprise you; let her story inspire you – let her authentic voice speak to you.

Andrea Emily Stumpf, March 24, 2025

Photo Credit: "Homo sapiens - modern humans," Australian Museum

[1] With early upright hominins dating back probably 7 million years, we can trace our common ancestor with the Neanderthals to half a million years ago – a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms during which we became the distinct and dominant strain that we are today.

[2] Podcast interview of Jonathan Krause by Jerusalem Demsas for The Atlantic magazine (February 25, 2025), titled “The Human-Neanderthal Love-Story Mystery.”

[3] J. Krause and T. Trappe, Hybris. Die Reise der Menschheit: Zwischen Aufbruch und Scheitern (2021) (translated into English as Hubris: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Humanity (2025)).

[4] This is less than 100 genes out of about 20,000 protein-coding genes, which make up only 2% of our overall genome. Also of note, “the genetic diversity of the 8 billion humans is relatively small, being traceable to a population of no more than 10,000 individuals who lived about 300-400,000 years ago.” (Hubris, p. 46)

[5] By way of scale, 10,000 years ago humans and their domesticated animals accounted for about 1/1000th of all mammals on the planet; today we account for 95%, reflecting our staggering population growth, but even more significantly the overall number of domestic animals. (Hubris, p. 139)

[6] In fact, paternally-inherited Y chromosomes point to whole takeovers by outside men as signs of “subjugation, exploitation, and colonization.” In Cuba, for example, Y chromosomes are predominantly of European origin. (Hubris, p. 160) A similar picture emerges from DNA traces in Bronze Age European women, whose children were conceived almost exclusively with dominating armed horsemen from the eastern steppe. (Hubris, p. 177)