"An early hominin arrival in Asia (Nature).
Evolutionary anthropologists used to have a coherent story when they could claim that humans arose in one area, Africa, and spread out from there. Maybe some mutation in the brain of an
‘anthropoid’ (human-like) ape turned it into the first ‘hominin’ (anything on the way to Homo sapiens).
The belief set many contented anthropologists looking for stone tools and skulls in southern Africa. But then those things started turning up in the wrong places.
Skulls in a cave in Dmanisi, Georgia, overturned beliefs by showing human-like skulls in southern Russia dated 1.78 million Darwin Years ago. Now, a cache of stone tools has turned up farther east in central China, dated 2.1 million Darwin Years ago. If these tool-makers came from Africa, they had significant smarts to migrate long distances and live in successful populations.
John Kappelman tries to put a good spin on this find, but for someone accustomed to think in terms of millions of years, how does a few thousand years sound? We add some questions in brackets:
Evolutionary anthropologists used to have a coherent story when they could claim that humans arose in one area, Africa, and spread out from there. Maybe some mutation in the brain of an
The belief set many contented anthropologists looking for stone tools and skulls in southern Africa. But then those things started turning up in the wrong places.
Skulls in a cave in Dmanisi, Georgia, overturned beliefs by showing human-like skulls in southern Russia dated 1.78 million Darwin Years ago. Now, a cache of stone tools has turned up farther east in central China, dated 2.1 million Darwin Years ago. If these tool-makers came from Africa, they had significant smarts to migrate long distances and live in successful populations.
John Kappelman tries to put a good spin on this find, but for someone accustomed to think in terms of millions of years, how does a few thousand years sound? We add some questions in brackets:
The roughly 14,000-kilometre trek from eastern Africa to eastern Asia represents a range expansion of dramatic proportions. The dispersal of hominins was probably facilitated by population increases [where are the bones?] as they moved into new territories and filled empty niches, and could also have been driven by the phenomenon of resource depletion that underlies the high mobility of today’s hunter-gatherers [all over the world?]. Yet even with a dispersal rate of only 5–15 kilometres per year, a value well inside the daily foraging range of modern hunter-gatherers, the distance between Africa and Asia could have been covered in just 1,000–3,000 years. The present record of hominin sites and the dating techniques that are currently available to researchers are not sufficient to resolve a dispersal event of such potential speed, or to determine its exact form, but we can surely look forward to more finds that will help to solve this migration mystery. [If you’ve been this wrong so far, why should anyone trust you?]." CEH
