New finds in West Asia have cast some doubt on the long-standing theory that our species originated in East Africa and spread from there to the rest of the world:
Early members of the genus Homo, possibly direct ancestors of people today, may have evolved in Asia and then gone to Africa, not vice versa as many scientists have assumed.
Most paleoanthropologists have favored an African origin for the potential human ancestor Homo erectus. But new evidence shows the species occupied a West Asian site called Dmanisi from 1.85 million to 1.77 million years ago, at the same time or slightly before the earliest evidence of this humanlike species in Africa, say geologist Reid Ferring of the University of North Texas in Denton and his colleagues.
The new Dmanisi discoveries point to an Asian homeland for H. erectus, the scientists propose online June 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Dmanisi was occupied repeatedly for roughly 80,000 years and supported a population that was well established and probably quite mobile,†Ferring says.
Evidence remains meager for the geographic origins of the Homo genus, says anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Several scenarios of Homo evolution are possible, and it’s possible that humankind’s genus got its start in Asia with H. erectus.
The idea that H. erectus evolved from H. habilis has been looking decreasingly likely for many years. Indeed, I would be surprised if habilis wasn’t reclassified as Australopithecus.
Dmanisi is located roughly in the east-west center of Georgia, near the Turkish border. I’ve long thought that Georgian archaeology and paleontology would become a very interesting field after the collapse of the Soviet Union and here’s a bit more evidence. A question that this find raises is the route by which our very distant ancestors arrived there. My speculation would be for a route along the Mediterranean or, as has been suggested by some other finds in the Arabian Peninsula, a seacoast route along the shores of the Gulf.
I love the numbers involved here. 80,000 years — as if that was something digestible by human imagination. Paris has been inhabited for about 2,000 years.
And of course nearly 2,000,000 years. Abraham was supposed to have lived something like 4,000 years ago, with Gilgamesh older by perhaps the entire history of Europeans in the New World. And yet even the 2 million years is a blink in the history of the earth, which is itself a blink in the history of the universe.
“Deep time” is one of the most important concepts in science and, possibly, our greatest advance over the ancient Greeks.
With immensely long periods of time all sorts of things become possible that otherwise would not have been. The evolution of species. The wearing away of stone and soil by the action of wind and water to create great canyons and erode ancient mountains. The development of the continents from one big landmass. The creation of the entire universe that we know from a single rift.
The Man Who Found Time
Good little book.
Also, Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle.
““Deep time†is one of the most important concepts in science and, possibly, our greatest advance over the ancient Greeks.”
Perhaps over the Greeks, but certainly not the Indians. In Indian philosophical thought, especially Buddhist, deep time is, as i t were, the background of everything. The unit of measurement, if you can call it that, is the kalpa. There are different definitions of it throughout the literature, but, basically, it’s a “very, very big number”. The definition I’ve always liked is this:
Imagine a stone cube 10 miles on a side, and further, imagine a devi — a goddess — walking around the cube. A kalpa is the time it would take for the stone cube to be worn completely down by the brushing of the devi’s sari against the side of the stone as she passed.
Sam:
Thanks for that. I love that story.
Again, barely related with actual “out of Africa”.
All one could say is that, before “out of Africa”, proto-Homo-erectus/habilis migrated from out of Asia or perhaps Georgia. But then, those who reached Africa became actual Homo erectus/habilis, which in turn eventually evolved into Homo sapiens (fill the rough history with all the taxonomical subdivisions you’d prefer), which in turn migrated out of Africa, and we’re these ones, not descendents from a geographical continuity from the Asian or European pre-erectus/habilis hominids.
The most of non-out-of-Africa we can get is the contribution from neanderthals and a few other human species with a fraction of the modern gene pool of non-Africans. But everyone is on the bulk a descendant from the Homo sapiens that migrated out of Africa.