More Earlier Migrations of Homo Sapiens

...an international team of researchers led by Hans-Peter Uerpmann from Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, Germany suggests that humans could have arrived on the Arabian Peninsula as early as 125,000 years ago -- directly from Africa rather than via the Nile Valley or the Near East, as researchers have suggested in the past. _SD

Hans-Peter Uerpmann
"Scientific consensus" regarding when modern humans began moving out of Africa has come in for some serious pounding from archaeologists and anthropologists recently. The latest find comes from the Arabian peninsula, from University of Tubingen's Hans-Peter Uerpmann.

The findings, based on a dig that continued from 2004 until 2010, are at odds with results from DNA testing and other archeological finds that put the "out of Africa" migrations much later.

The southern route out of east Africa proposed by the new research is also significantly different from the northern route across the Nile River and into the Sinai that has been traditionally accepted as most likely.

Addressing those very different scenarios, Uerpmann said that their archeological findings offer a new interpretation and that the advanced method of determining the age of the tools gives them great confidence in their results.

Team member Anthony Marks of Southern Methodist University, an anthropologist, said the tools were made in ways consistent with the 125,000-years-ago time period and therefore raise the inevitable question of how they got to the area near the Persian Gulf.

"Either these people came out of East Africa or they came from nowhere," he said.

The dig is being conducted about 40 miles from the Straits of Hormuz, the entry point into the Persian Gulf. The tools were found in a small limestone mountain range in the U.A.E. province of Shuja. _WaPo

Recent findings of modern human fossils in Israel dating well over 100,000 years ago had earlier shaken the complacency of the embattled "Ouf of Africa" consensus. As research findings continue to come in contradicting some of the most treasured beliefs of mainstream anthropology, a significant restructuring or modification of the "consensus" may become unavoidable.

This new research, placing early humans on the Arabian Peninsula much earlier, will appear in the 28 January issue of Science, which is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

The team of researchers, including lead author Simon Armitage from Royal Holloway, University of London, discovered an ancient human toolkit at the Jebel Faya archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates. It resembles technology used by early humans in east Africa but not the craftsmanship that emerged from the Middle East, they say. This toolkit includes relatively primitive hand-axes along with a variety of scrapers and perforators, and its contents imply that technological innovation was not necessary for early humans to migrate onto the Arabian Peninsula. Armitage calculated the age of the stone tools using a technique known as luminescence dating and determined that the artifacts were about 100,000 to 125,000 years old.

...Uerpmann and his team also analyzed sea-level and climate-change records for the region during the last interglacial period, approximately 130,000 years ago. They determined that the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which separates Arabia from the Horn of Africa, would have narrowed due to lower sea-levels, allowing safe passage prior to and at the beginning of that last interglacial period. At that time, the Arabian Peninsula was much wetter than today with greater vegetation cover and a network of lakes and rivers. Such a landscape would have allowed early humans access into Arabia and then into the Fertile Crescent and India, according to the researchers.

"Archaeology without ages is like a jigsaw with the interlocking edges removed — you have lots of individual pieces of information but you can't fit them together to produce the big picture," said Armitage. "At Jebel Faya, the ages reveal a fascinating picture in which modern humans migrated out of Africa much earlier than previously thought, helped by global fluctuations in sea-level and climate change in the Arabian Peninsula." _ArchaeologyNews

Significantly more evolutionary divergence has occurred within the human species than mainstream PC anthropology has been willing to admit. A de facto PC censorship over several politically sensitive areas of science is becoming more and more difficult to maintain.

We Are All Israelis Now: Reframing the Right of Return

In what could change the whole picture of human evolution, archaeologists claim that modern man may have evolved in the West Asia, rather than Africa, after they discovered remains said to be 400,000 years old.

A team, led by Prof Avi Gopher and Dr Ran Barkai of the Tel Aviv University, has found eight human-like teeth in the Qesem cave near Rosh Ha’Ayin, 10 miles from Israel’s Ben Gurion airport.

The teeth were 400,000 years old, from the Middle Pleistocene Age, which would make them the earliest remains of homo sapiens yet discovered... _DeccaChronicle

JPostThe discovery of 400,000 year old teeth in Qesem Cave inside Israel, suggests that modern humans may have evolved in the middle east -- not in Africa as most anthropologists believe. This discovery can be added to a host of others which contradicts the common belief that all modern humans are descended from a branch of the human tree which evolved inside Africa.

Long before the land was called Israel and the residents Jews, Homo sapiens lived here twice as long ago as was previously believed, the researchers wrote in the latest (December) edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The cave was uncovered in 2000 by Prof. Avi Gopher and Dr. Ran Barkai of TAU’s Institute of Archeology. Later, Prof. Israel Hershkowitz of the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at TAU’s Sackler School of Medicine and an international team of scientists performed a morphological analysis on the teeth found in the cave.

The examination included CT scans and X-rays indicating the size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern man. The teeth found in the cave are also very similar to evidence of modern man dated to around 100,000 years ago that had previously been discovered in the Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel and the Qafzeh Cave in the Lower Galilee near Nazareth.

The Qesem Cave is dated between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, and archeologists working there believe that the findings indicate significant changes in the behavior of ancient man. This period of time was crucial in the history of mankind from cultural and biological perspectives, and the fact that teeth of modern man were discovered indicates that these changes are apparently related to evolutionary changes taking place at that time, they maintained. _JPost

If these findings are confirmed, they will throw a monstrous monkey wrench into anthropological discussions. One of the reasons the "out of Africa" viewpoint has been made official dogma, is that it unifies all of the branches of modern humanity. This makes it possible for educated people to say with a straight face that there is no difference in average intelligence or developmental potential between different populations of humans -- even though the best of modern science demonstrates very real differences.

Science moves forward, even when powerful interests wish otherwise.

Does Homo Erectus Walk Among Us?

There is a lot of discussion about a recent Nature article which looks at DNA from an ancient group of humans found in Denisova Cave in Russian Siberia.

Fossils found in the Russian republic of Altai belong to a previously unknown branch of human development.

Researchers at the University of California who were conducting the study found that the remains belong to a little girl, who died 30,000 years ago.

According to experts, she was not of the Neanderthal species, as a tooth similar to the structure Homo Erectus teeth was discovered. _Ruvr.ru

Some modern-day people carry Denisovan genes. Through genetic comparisons Pääbo’s team found that some people from Melanesia — an assemblage of islands off Australia’s east coast, including New Guinea — share 4 to 6 percent of their genomes with the Denisovans. This probably indicates that the Denisovans interbred with anatomically modern humans despite the split between our lineages over a million years ago. _Wired

ImageSource

The most significant finding in the paper is the demonstration that some living humans trace significant fraction of their ancestry to the population represented by the Denisova genome. As in the case of Neanderthals, different human populations show significantly different levels of similarity to the Denisova sequence. For Neanderthals, the similarities indicated between one and four percent Neanderthal ancestry for living people outside of Africa. In the case of the Denisova sequence, the greatest similarities are with living people in Melanesia – in this paper, represented by genome samples from Papua New Guinea and Bougainville. The similarities are consistent with approximately 4% contribution of a Denisova-like population to the ancestry of these living Melanesians.

The paper estimates that together, the Denisova and Neanderthal-derived genes account for 8% of the ancestry of these living people. _JohnHawks

...the evidence now suggests that an ancestral group of early humans left Africa up to 400,000 years ago and diverged, with one branch heading to Europe and becoming the Neanderthals and a second moving east and becoming Denisovans.

When modern humans left Africa - some 80,000 years ago - they came into contact with first the Neanderthals before another group interbred with Denisovans, the traces of which now exist in Melanesia. _Telegraph

Wired
John Hawks' Denisova FAQ

Interesting discussion of implications for anthropology and the "Out of Africa" thesis

Greg Cochran suggests in comments that Denisovans are likely an Asian Homo Erectus.

Erectus Walks Among Us -- a free-wheeling, highly speculative and imaginative look at an alternative anthropological theory contesting "Out of Africa" in a most strenuous manner.  Unintentionally humorous in many ways.  Not Safe for Work

Apparently, due to the Denisovan findings and the recent Neandertal genome findings, a lot of anthropological data will need to be re-sorted and reclassified. It does not help matters when issues of "political correctness" which are so rampant in the field of "cultural anthropology" are allowed to intrude upon the far more scientific branch of "physical anthropology."

Unfortunately, modern science is so corrupted by political constraints and politicised funding and publishing, that an objective study of many areas of science is practically prohibited. Time may erode the stranglehold of political correctness on science, eventually.