Evidence Found for Earliest Modern Humans

Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at Arizona State University report that they have pushed back the date for the earliest modern humans to 164,000 years ago, far earlier than previously documented. Paleoanthropologists now say that genetic and fossil evidence suggests that modern human species — Homo sapiens — evolved in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago and in seeking the "perfect site" to explore for remains of the earliest populations, researchers analyzed ocean currents, climate data, geological formations and other data to pin down a location. "The world was in a glacial stage 125,000 to 195,000 years ago, and much of Africa was dry to mostly desert; in many areas food would have been difficult to acquire. The paleoenvironmental data indicate there are only five or six places in all of Africa where humans could have survived these harsh conditions," said Curtis Marean, a professor in ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Photos from the cave at Pinnacle Point in South Africa show where the team found ochre, bladelets and evidence of shellfish — findings that reveal the earliest dated evidence of modern humans."

Comments

Re:Are they really looking at the right places?

[kestasjk]

You're right that this finding does contradict the traditional savannah theory of human evolution, as do many other findings, but it fits right in with the ever increasingly popular aquatic ape theory of human evolution.

The idea is basically that as the climate dried up human ancestors stuck closer to rivers and oceans, where the trees and water were, and ate shellfish and other seafood. (It doesn't mean we became fully aquatic, like mermaids. Just that we became as aquatic as we are now.)

The rich seafood diet has plenty of all the stuff needed to fuel a large brain. It also explains why we can hold our breath and babies can instinctively hold their breath underwater, and why we have no body hair, downward pointing nostrils, webbed fingers, dilute urine, and why we find homo fossils in sediment but not chimpanzee fossils, and why baboons, which came down from the trees and onto the savannah, didn't become human-like, etc, etc.

The savannah theory says that as the climate dried up human ancestors that had previously lived in trees started to move out into the savannah.