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Humans First Arose in Asia?
IZ Reloaded writes "Two archaeologists are proposing the idea that early humans first arose in Asia instead of Africa as previously thought. These early humans then migrate out of Asia to parts of the world. From National Geographic: 'The unresolved status of the intriguing Flores finds attributed to H. floresiensis leaves open the possibility that this species is the end result and last survivor of an ancient migration of very primitive humans, or even prehumans, that formerly existed more widely across Asia ... '"
Actually, it seems like they're proposing that humans (or, rather, their ancestors) migrated from Asia to Africa *before* what we already know about, so the two theories don't rule each other out. It all just depends on where you draw the line between "human" and "not quite human yet".
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Actually, after having RTFA, the article is somewhat sensationalised.
First, they do not doubt that H. erectus came out of Africa, it's very well established that it did. The issue with that, is that H. sapiens are believed to have had H. erectus as ancestors. So "humans" in so far as it means H. sapiens, came from Africa to the best possible explaination that anyone has.
The issue here is that they're discussing where other hominids came from, and where the hominids that evolved in Africa came from.
If they did mean Asia, then it would mean somewhere near the modern country of Georgia, not far east Asia, or middle east Asia. Just plain "Asia" (it's pretty easy to forget that many Russians are Asians, not Europeans)
Since they know those areas of Asia to have been covered with similar Savannahs as Africa during about 1.8 some million years ago, they say that you can't rule out that early hominids could have been thriving in that area, or that hominids didn't actually come from that area, and just had an early migration into Africa.
They point to H. floresiensis, saying that it was likely a terminating evolutionary point of an orphaned hominid line independent of African evolutionary heritage.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
I believe spaghetti originated in Italy.
Marco Polo imported it from china.
You can't take the sky from me...
Er? The Polynesians sailed all over the place in the Pacific Ocean long before Columbus and Cortez and the rest of the Europeans. See also Easter Island.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Well, on the issue of Humans getting to North America, there is a huge margin as to when they got here. The Clovis points are the oldest flint tools associated with the North American Clovis culture. They date to the Paleo-Indian period around 13,500 years ago. Some archaeologists have found similarities between the Solutean in what is now the south of France and the later Clovis culture of North America and suggested that the Solutreans crossed the Ice Age Atlantic by moving along the pack ice edge using survival skills similar to that of modern Inuit people. The Solutean were around about 23,000 years ago.
The rise and fall of global sea levels has exposed the Bering Land Bridge in several periods of the Pleistocene. The bridging land mass" is believed to have existed both in the glaciation that occurred before 35,000 BC and during the more recent period 20,000-5,000 BC.
So, Humans by the Bering Land Bridge could have gotten here from before 35,000 BC to 11-12,000 BC. If the Clovis points point to European settlement, then theres a period from 21,000 BC to 11,000 BC for them to get here.
Now there is evidence in South America while predates Clovis by a 1000 years and evidence in South Carolina which dates to 50,000 years ago now.
Personally, I think settlement of the Americas likely happened over a longer period of time and new waves from Europe and Asia came during the various Ice Ages, with others coming from Oceania in boats over the centuries. Following that, there was likely contact at very low levels between the Americas and the rest of the world since then and predating both the Vikings and Columbus.
"I'm not debating their points (I've not read the article yet), but it would seem to require us to throw out the data that we already have."
No, it doesn't.
It just asks us to start looking in Asia also. "All the evidence" comes from Africa because all the digs are happening in Africa. Archaeology and paleontology are sciences which suffer from heavy biases in their observations. First off, what are the chances that any bone would become a fossil? Slim to none. Secondly, we can't ramdonly sample the whole earth's surface with dig teams. We dig in places where the lead researcher "has a good feeling", or gets word from a local farmer about strange rocks.
"If homo species migrated to the rest of the world from Asia, then it would have requires Lucy, a relatively primitive human to have gotten to Africa, then start a long series of descendents and multiple branches of evolution there, eventually resulting in homo sapiens."
Lucy, who was an Australopithecus afarensis (way before people -- not even Homo or same as us ) stays in Africa, as does her descendants, A. garhi.
Her even later descendents Homo erectus, H. habilis, or neanderthalis wanders out into Asia and becomes H. sapiens, who in turn wanders back to Africa, and of course, the rest of the world. Note that fossils of H. erectus, which is considered to be two species before modern humans, were found in Dragonbone cave in China.
A good understanding of this wikipedia entry for human evolution might help you understand the situation.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Most countries have a noodle or spagetti type food that is considard ethnic to that region, however the earlyest record of a noodle-type food comes from China - 4,000 year old noodles were recently dug up at a archaeological site near the Yellow River in northwestern China. Check it out!
That wasn't a snake. It was the Noodly Appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (The rest of the FSM was hiding further up the tree.) Oh, and it wasn't an apple that was offered to Eve - it was a tomato.
--Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
The article talks quite a bit about fossil evidence, but what about the genetic evidence? If you look at the variability of human genetics, you find that europeans aren't very genetically diverse. Similarly, American Indians aren't very genetically diverse, and Asians aren't either. Africans, on the other hand, are very genetically diverse. What this indicates is that the human race' history in Africa goes back much further than anywhere else. It appears that a subset of Africans left Africa and colonized the rest of the world. Here's a short article that talks about human genetic diversity compared to their location: http://info.med.yale.edu/genetics/kkidd/point.html
http://www.umich.edu/news/?Releases/2005/Oct05/r10 1805
It seems like you're paraphrasing (badly) Pascal's Wager. Google it.
Trolling is a art,
What criteria are you using?
A fair question.
Here is one comment that may explain the statement:
And
Bitter and proud of it.
We are Terrans. Goku and Vegeta are Saiyans. According to the Dragonball Z Series, the Saiyans have nothing to do with the Terrans. We are two totally seprate species. It just so happens that the Terrans and Saiyans are Biologically and genetically close enough to inter-marry.
I heard a conspiricy Theroy among Dragon Ball Fans that Akira Toriyama had the Kaioshin plan it that way.
Stephen Mansfield, author of The Faith of George W. Bush, goes on to say: "Not long after, Bush called James Robison (a prominent minister) and told him, 'I've heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for President.' " Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention heard Bush say something similar: "Among the things he said to us was: I believe that God wants me to be president, but if that doesn't happen, it's OK.' "
Source
We are no longer fighting a great enemy, we are asserting a great principle: that the talents and dreams of average people - their warm human hopes and loves - should be rewarded by freedom and protected by peace. We are defending the nobility of normal lives, lived in obedience to God and conscience, not to government.
Source
In Dilip Hiro's book "Secrets and Lies," Hiro quotes the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha'aretz of June 24, 2003, reporting that Bush told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas: "God told me to strike at Al Qaida (sic) and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."
Source
Of course, perhaps you can provide some sources that state otherwise?
/.: why the hell am I here?
This is not Roebroeks and Dennell's hypothesis. They propose that the "Out of Africa 1" theory where Homo ergaster/erectus migrates out of africa 1.8 Myear ago is wrong. Instead they propose that an earlier more primitive humanoid migrated out of africa earlier and that Homo erectus evolved in asia and then back migrated to africa.
This hypothesis is consistent with the "Out of Africa 2" theory proposed by Stringer et al which requires a relatively the recent evolution of Homo sapiens in africa and its subsequent spread throughout the world.
Their views are better summarized in the following link:
http://research.leidenuniv.nl/index.php3?m=1&c=144
Than in the National Geographic News article.
It's trickier than that. It's highly unlikely that there was only one woman. (Your post doesn't explicitly make that claim, but a lot of people misunderstand the subject to mean that.) It's possible for there to have been lots and lots of women, but because mitochondria are only passed from women to children, and because roughly half the kids are boys, it's possible to have, over a fifteen or twenty generation sequence, only one woman's mitochondria passed through. I'm working from "Patterns In Evolution" by Roger Lewin here, and, as a demo, he posits 16 couples, each of whom have two children, and tracking those through 15 generations.
"At each generation, one quarter of the mothers will have two male offspring, one quarter will have two females, and one half will have one of each. The mitochondrial lineages of mothers that have only males will come to an end and eventually one lineage will dominate the entire population."
In other words, the Eve hypothesis shows the region of origin of modern humanity, which is pretty clearly Africa, and tells us roughly when, assuming mitochondrial DNA information drift is relatively constant. It does not require a big population bottleneck. People probably assumed a bottleneck from an incomplete understanding of genetics and a certain wish to have a correlation with a well-known story (in the West) about a single mother of all humans.
The dude who did the original research, Alan Wilson, estimated there were probably over 10,000 women in the breeding community that contained the ancestral Eve. Other critics of the theory say you can't even make THAT claim.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
That someone made the watch, or that it spontaneously self generated via some chance conglomeration of gears and springs
Check out The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.
Trolling is a art,
*sigh* Phillip Johnson was a legal-beagle with an interest in protecting his mythology from science. Virtualy everything he's writing has been proven wrong by the scientific community. Of course you won't hear that from the Creationist money launderers.While we're trading links, here's one on Johnson.
Trolling is a art,