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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 ... '"
We have tons of data points showing homo sapiens evolved in Africa. So many of the missing links like Lucy and other members of the homo tree have all been found in Africa.
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. 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.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
You can find that almost anywhere. Like here - browse at -1, for example.
You feel that beeing releated to Slashdotter regulars is an improvement?
Amazing, even human evolution is getting outsourced to Asia!
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Ah yes, but religion is so CONVENIENT. It means that often the believer needs to make no personal moral decisions (your religion makes absolute moral decisions for you), and everyone's split into two camps: People that are going to Heaven (usually believers) and people that are going to Hell (usually everyone else). Often the sheer convenience and lifelong training in a religion overrides a personal quest for scientific truth.
Furthurmore, in times where science would say to you "Hey man, you're 100% screwed!" religion can give a more optimistic answer. It's easy to decry religion when you're sitting in front of your LCD or CRT, but it's can give hope to the otherwise hopeless if they think that an all-powerful, all-knowing being is watching over their backs ready to send them to paradise when they die.
I have no problem with religion whatsoever. However, I think that religion should stay in churches (for example) and science should stay in schools, universities, etc. Everything has its time and place.
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Let me check with the Flying Spaghetti monster on this... he says no! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_spaghetti_mons ter
Wasn't spaghetti invented in Asia?
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.
Wow... I'm stunned by such arrogance. Are you blind to the fact that your are just replacing one god with another? You took a story about scientist finding evidence that humans may have originated in Asia and turned it into an anti-God tirade in an attempt to make yourself feel good about your own opinion. Wow...
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
"There is not enough love and goodness in the world for us to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things."
-- Nietzsche
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Wouldn't it be possible that pre-humans migrated to different locations and finished their evolution separately? Considering Neandrathals are no longer considered in a direct evolutionary line to modern humans, that indicates a separate branch of evolution.
Distinctly different environments, like Asia and Africa, could account for something like this. Multiple evolutionary paths, occurring in multiple physical locations on the planet. Why do scientists seem so attached to the "Eve" theory?
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Evil Lord Xenu froze all the alien races and dumped them into volcanoes here on earth. Their souls were collected by soul vacuumes and then forced to watch movies and be brainwashed, only to then inhabit the bodies of primitive man. I think that's how it goes, I still have to pay for a few more audit councelings before my thetan levels are capable of truly grasping this profound knowledge
Intelligent Design is something most Christians reject and even a lot of fundamental Christians reject. Intelligent Design was created for political purposes and no religion has publicly supported the theory. You know when Rick Santorum hates Intelligent Design, it is dead. After the Bush clan leaves office, we will never hear about it again.
Most major religions do not reject the idea of evolution. After all God could have created man through evolution. Fundamental Christians (Bible literalists) actually believe God everything in seven days. Most other Christian religions don't interpret the Book of Genesis literally.
To say Christians are against science is nonsense. Some of the greatest scientists of our times were Christians.
On the first day, man created God and he was pleased with what he'd achieved. On the second day, man worshiped God and life was good. On the third day, different men had different ideas about God and their cultures diverged. On the fourth day, men spilt blood over these differences and it has been this way ever since.
Yeah because man wouldn't have wars if it wasn't for religion. All of John Lennon's lyrics are true if you just "imagine". If men were all the same except some people had blue eyes and other brown eyes, there would be wars between brown eye people and blue eyed people.
You seem to have a cartoon view of Christians I won't be able to change but go ahead and live in ignorance.
So an early asian humanoid and a early african humanoid walk into a bar...
Why isn't everyone driving around at 20 mph with their turning signal on?
> Take a look at your dollar bills "In god we thrust"
*chuckle*
ZOMG TORRENT PLS!!!
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I'm turning Japanese
I think I'm turning Japanese
I really think so
and sony rootkits.
--
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Were they looking for I.T. jobs?
There are few modern human traits more galling than this belief that "early man" was a primitive idiot who was lucky to not piss on his own feet.
It so often ends up underpinning stupid theories about aliens building pyramids or landing strips and whatnot. All because the idea that those "primitive savages" could have understood concepts like engineering or surveying (or in this case, sailing) is so unbelievable to them.
You are no less ignorant, friend. Your characterization of science as merely blind guessing reveals a deep misunderstanding. Science is not a religion because it's innacurate and old theories are superseded by new ones. This is is built in to science. It is intended to be this way. That's key to the scientific method. Science does not work in absolutisms as does religion. However, it is a pretty safe bet to say that a few things are unlikely to be disproven, and evolution is one of those. We understand its workings fairly well, though this is not to say that we completely do. We're almost certainly wrong on some of the specifics, perhaps even some of the basics. But in general, everything points in that direction. How often will you find someone willing to say that about their religion?
I suspect that one of the reasons for this is simple... most of their tools and cultural artifacts were made of organic substances: wood, leather, bone and horn. Thus they simply didn't leave a lot for us to find that survived the millennia.
Therefore, people have this image of naked, tool-less man-apes drooling on themselves. Silly. Ancient peoples were (at most) only marginally less clever than ourselves... and I'm willing to bet that living without technology in an environment that's constantly trying to kill you would be conducive to some pretty amazing problem solving.
Besides, for something like sailing, you don't need everyone to succeed. They may have failed ten thousand times before a breeding population finally survived. The arch of time is vast.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
I dunno about western culture. Here in the Northwest region of America, every block there is either Indian, Sushi, Thai, Teriyaki or Chinese food. If you watch movies like the Matrix, you see Asian influenced martial arts. If you play video games you are most likely playing a Nintendo or a Playstation. If you watch cartoons, you are most likely watching a Japanese animated story.
It's a myth that the Chinese didn't use gun powder as weapons. In fact they did. In fact the idea of a Chinese person is also a myth. It's like the myth of an American person. That's why they are successful. They were one of the first places that took disparate groups and held it under one rule as one people, even though quite a few of the inhabitants spoke different languages and were of differerent "races". You might argue that the Romans did that as well, but they failed to hold on to it.
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,
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.
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.
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