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 ... '"

Comments

Not completely unreasonable

[clambake]

The earliest known pottery, some 20~30,000 years old, is found in Japan and China (every couple of years one side or the other finds an even older one). Pottery indicates civilization, simply because nomadic hunter gatherer type people don't have a lot of time to sit down, find suitable clay, mold it, and build a firing kiln, and pottery doesn't trvel particularly well to boot.

If the first civilization arrose in Asia, then it is not a completely abberational jump to say that humans started around there. Still would need a lot of investigation, of course.

Re:In parallel?

[Shihar]

It is believed that at one point the population of the human race was knocked down to a few thousand. This is backed up with genetic testing. Humans are extremely similar in terms of genetics. There is more difference between two random humans in the same race, then there is between two average humans of different races. In other words, if were to average all the genetics of each individual race, you would find that they are more similar to each other then difference you find between humans due to natural variation. It is pretty conclusive that humans all descend from the same few thousand people.

Re:In parallel?

[deathcloset]

The "Eve" theory is evidenced by mitochondrial DNA.

We are all related to some nice lady from about 150,000 years ago. that's EVERYONE, mind you.

DNA doesn't lie. Modern homosapiens are all from the same place.

Already solved

[Markus Registrada]

It's surprising that this comes out now. The origins of modern humanity were explicated just a few months ago, and the loose ends have already been tied up.

The problem has always been that there are two sorts of strong evidence: humans are almost all alike, and humans evolved in place. (E.g. early Australians were H. erectus; later they had mixed erectus and sap. characteristics; eventually the erectus features faded and vanished, leaving pure H. sap.) Naturally each had adherents who preferred to discount the others' evidence. The two have certainly seemed contradictory, up until now.

They were both right. What spread out of Africa was not actual populations of H. sap. etc., supplanting H. erectus populations that preceded them. Rather, successful gene complexes that define H. sap. spread out of Africa, upgrading local populations in-place. (Think of them as software patches.) Hardly anybody had to migrate any farther than the next village over. People married into neighboring villages, bringing their genetic advances with them, and the next generation brought them to the next village along. Of course successful genes could spread back to Africa, too, but Africa had the most variation, so produced more of the successful genes, and packaged them with more other, complementary genes.

Contrast this with the spread of agriculture into Europe, where there's evidence of farmers actually supplanting hunter/gatherers; and of course the historical record, with wholesale slaughters and genocides. (No doubt there was plenty of slaughtering earlier, but it takes technology, language, and civilized infantilization for genocides to be conducted efficiently.)

It doesn't seem like there are many other species in which this process would have worked. Bears, maybe.

Re:Already solved

[radtea]

(E.g. early Australians were H. erectus; later they had mixed erectus and sap. characteristics; eventually the erectus features faded and vanished, leaving pure H. sap.)

Your argument would be stronger if there were any non-controversial evidence for H. erectus in Australia:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/kowswamp.html

But I take that to be an unfortunately-choosen hypothetical example, rather than an actual error.

Your position is not entirely-dissimilar to the old The Multiregional Evolution Model: http://www.geocities.com/palaeoanthropology/Herect us.html

Gene complexes hardly ever travel without organisms wrapped around them, so what you seem to be arguing for is a specific mechanism for multi-regional evolution. It isn't impossible, but whatever happened is radically under-determined by the data, and it is very likely that we are quite wrong about at least some major components of any story we tell about human evolution.

For example, it is virtually certain that H. sapiens evolved much earlier than the earliest currently-known examples, simply because the sampling rate due to fossilazation and discovery is so fantastically low. The sum total of H. sapiens fossils antedating 10000 years ago is only a few dozen, out of hundreds of thousands or more inviduals who lived over the early history of our species. The odds of us just happening to have found a skeleton from the very earliest period, when the smallest numbers of individuals would be around, is very unlikely.

Indeed, the apparent concordance between the current "earliest human skeleton" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/0502 23122209.htm) and the most-likely genetic date based on mitocondrial DNA is so improbable as to be disturbing.

I am therefore betting we will eventually find that H. sapiens evolved much earlier, but went through a genetic bottleneck 200,000 years ago, giving us our most recent common ancestor. Such bottlenecks can be seen in a lot of North American fauna, where you frequently see populations that can be traced back to a single, small, non-diverse population 10,000 years ago that was in a geographically-restricted range due to the last ice age.