writing
As skim as my abilities in science postulating. I am willing to believe that our primitive ancestors felt life more prolifically than we do. And that they built things and sang. Tactily understood physics and art.
Common humanity with gorilla split about 10 million plus years ago.
"They calculated that humans and chimps split earlier than expected—at least 7 million to 8 million years ago and possibly as early as 13 million years ago. They estimate the split between gorillas and the lineage leading to humans and chimpanzees to 8 million to 19 million years ago."
https://www.science.org/content/article/generation-gaps-suggest-ancient-human-ape-split
"Life during the Miocene Epoch was mostly supported by the two newly formed biomes, kelp forests and grasslands. This allows for more grazers, such as horses, rhinoceroses,and hippos. Ninety five percent of modern plants existed by the end of this epoch."
https://www.geologypage.com/2014/05/miocene-epoch.html
It is likely our lineage of hominid followed kelp forests
"In the past 20 years, new discoveries of fossil apes from the Miocene have transformed our ideas about the timing, geography, and causes of the evolution of the African apes and humans. Darwin predicted that the common ancestor of African apes and humans would be found in Africa. Yet the majority of fossil great apes are from Europe and Asia."
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.105047
"Analysis of the DNA from [ ] ten individuals provided several key revelations about ancient migrations. First, the broad movements of ancient humans and cultures across Eurasia are evidenced by the discovery of an entirely new population that lived in Siberia’s Altai Mountains. That culture’s descendants [ ] were part of lineages that later helped populate both Europe and the Americas. Secondly, individuals of Japan’s Jomon culture, isolated in the archipelago for thousands of years, migrated back to the Asian mainland from which their ancestors came. And finally, Native Americans migrated back into Asia several times over a span of thousands of years.
The remains of some of the study’s oldest individuals, dated to some 7,500 years before present, are part of the previously unknown population of hunter-gatherers who lived in the Altai Mountains."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-dna-evidence-charts-native-american-migrations-back-across-the-bering-sea-180981435/
"Evidence since the late 1980s has shown that there were people living in parts of the Americas long before the time of the Clovis migration. Archaeological evidence of people living on islands off of Asia and on the North and South American coasts (some as far south as Chile) has been found going as far back as 14,000 to 18,000 years ago. Evidence has also been found of people living in the North American interior as far back as 16,000 years ago.
This would have been possible, the authors note, because of what has come to be known as the kelp highway—kelp forests growing just offshore.
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-anthropologist-group-humans-americas-kelp.html