Did first humans come out of Middle East and not Africa?...(full title too long for subject line)

[ZombieHorde]

Did first humans come out of Middle East and not Africa? Israeli discovery forces scientists to re-examine evolution of modern man

By Matthew Kalman

Scientists could be forced to re-write the history of the evolution of modern man after the discovery of 400,000-year-old human remains.

Until now, researchers believed that homo sapiens, the direct descendants of modern man, evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago and gradually migrated north, through the Middle East, to Europe and Asia.

Recently, discoveries of early human remains in China and Spain have cast doubt on the 'Out of Africa' theory, but no-one was certain.

The new discovery of pre-historic human remains by Israeli university explorers in a cave near Ben-Gurion airport could force scientists to re-think earlier theories.

~Snip the rest of the article. Sigh, only four sentences because web journalism doesn't use proper punctuation.~

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1341973/Did-humans-come-Middle-East-Africa-Scientists-forced-write-evolution-modern-man.html#ixzz19LShceYV

[dimbear]

1. The out of Africa theory will take a bunch of disproving.....

There's very sound genetic evidence that there's a genetic bottleneck through which all modern humans passed in Northern Africa.

That doesn't prove they didn't evolve somewhere else and move to Africa, but it's not the simplest explanation.

[ZombieHorde]

2. I agree, but the teeth are a very interesting find.

Hopefully people will find more around that area.

[Ghost Dog]

3. Rift Valley -> Ethiopia -> Nile Valley -> North Africa / Middle East -> ...

would seem to make common sense. It should be possible to find other older specimens of these ancestors of behaviorally modern homo sapiens sapiens.

I read that from there the spread around the Indian Ocean was very rapid.

I speculate that, North Africa being very fertile for a long time back then, correct me if I'm wrong, it would also have been colonised rapidly. Since crossing, in the right weather, the Strait of Gibraltar (between the Pillars of Hercules) may not have daunted a culture already accustomed to lakes and rivers, the Iberian Peninsula might have been colonized early as well.

[dimbear]

8. Agreed. Also notice the data is skewed because the area

is very extensively investigated on the one hand, and on the other hand not disturbed by geological upheavals like sinking into the ocean, a la the similarly dated areas of Great Britain and the present day coast of Alaska.

It's a little like the theory that you're more likely to find things under the streetlight.

:)

[starroute]

4. Not modern humans -- but perhaps archaic Homo sapiens

It seems pretty definite that fully modern humans appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago. But there's some fuzziness concerning the earlier evolutionary leaps.

One of those leaps led from the Australopithecines to Homo erectus. It's never been pinned down precisely when and where that took place, but the most primitive Homo erectus fossils are those which have been found in former Soviet Georgia and dated to 1.8 million years ago. Shortly thereafter, Homo erectus or closely related forms show up everywhere from Spain to Africa to Java.

A second leap from Homo erectus to archaic Homo sapiens then occurred perhaps 700,000 years ago -- but again, nobody knows precisely when or where. The offshoots of that leap also appear to have spread out and diversified after 500,000 years ago, and their remains are found in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

If the tooth that's been discovered is specifically like those of modern humans -- and unlike the Neanderthals of Europe or the newly-discovered Denisovans of Asia -- it would suggest that the branch of the family tree which led to us was already becoming physically more like us.

But the final changes in brain organization which led from archaic to modern Homo sapiens -- ourselves -- are very unlikely to go back anything like that far.

[rhett o rick]

5. And I was beginning to believe that the world was only 10,000 years old. Hmmm. nm

[qazplm]

6. I think we came out of

Uranus.

[ZombieHorde]

7. Well, I do occasionally get bean burritos at Taco Bell. nt

[laconicsax]

9. It's quite possible that the remains represent an earlier migration.

IIRC, one current model is one of successive migratory waves out of Africa.

[xchrom]

10. i think these things can change.

it depends on where and how widespread hominids were -- so i suppose it's possible.

it doesn't change that we are part of the primate tree -- might change some of the geographic history.