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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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I am not an expert on the field but it seems that Out of Africa is becoming more controversial over the alternative that humanity evolved in different continents. There is also the idea of multiple waves of immigration out of Africa. As for the multi-regional model, in addition to evolving to different environments, part of this evolution has been also breeding with different hominid species. We simply keep finding hominids and ancient humans in regions outside of Africa that at minimum challenges the certainty of Out of Africa model.

The findings support a multiregional hypothesis, which argues that before our species left Africa for Europe, there was continuous gene flow between at least two different populations.

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-first-humans-out-of-africa-werent-quite-who-we-thought

https://www.quora.com/Was-the-out-of-Africa-theory-debunked

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99257&page=1 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-out-of-africa-theory-out/ https://www.livescience.com/ancient-human-vertebra-found-israel https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/evolution-theory-out-of-africa-dali-skull-china-homo-erectus-sapiens-latest-a8064306.html

I mean, Out of Africa in the narrow sense of "100% of our ancestry comes from a single migration from Africa that completely wiped out all other human populations without interbreeding" has been debunked, but it has been replaced with "~95% of our ancestry comes from a single migration from Africa and the rest from interbreeding with other human populations that migrated from Africa at earlier times" which still fits the simpler statement "we all came from Africa."

As far as I know, the story recostructed from fossils and genetics is like this:

  1. Genus Homo evolves in East or South Africa from earlier bipedal apes (e.g. Australopithecus) between 2.5 and 2 million years ago.
  2. First out-of-Africa migration by Homo ergaster/erectus, which uses knapped stone tools and fire but still has a noticeably smaller brain than ours, about 1.5 million years ago. Populations migrate into tropical Asia ("Peking Man", "Java Man", the "Hobbits" of Flores). All or near all the ancestry of modern humans comes from the populations that stayed in Africa.
  3. Second out-of-Africa migration by Homo heidelbergensis, which makes wooden spears and builds early shelters, 800-500,000 years ago. This wave gets much farther north, and eventually spawns the Neanderthals of Europe and the Near East, and the Denisovans of north-central Asia, but still never leaves greater Afro-Eurasia. The much more primitive ergaster descendants are completely replaced, surviving for longer only on islands.
  4. Our own species, Homo sapiens, appears somewhere in Africa between 300 and 200,000 years ago. After 100,000 years ago or so it starts developing modern tech like spear throwers and stone arrowtips as well as the earliest abstract and figurative art. The ancestors of San, Hadza, and Pygmy peoples split off from other modern human populations. Meanwhile, Neanderthals and Denisovans develop into their late form and exchange genes.
  5. Third out-of-Africa migration by Homo sapiens, with an abortive migration through Egypt into the Near East 100,000 years ago and then a crossing from Ethiopia into Yemen 70,000 years ago. The wave first follows the tropical coast of Asia, absorbing some Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA along the way, into Australia. A "ghost species" of which no fossils are known leaves behind some DNA in Subsaharan populations. After 50-40,000 years ago the Eurasian populations start moving northward, crossing further with Neanderthals and developing technology suited for cold environments, and eventually crossing into the Americas.

I suppose in the end the answer seems to be kind of an Hegelian synthesis of multiregionalism and out-of-Africa, but I'd say the latter wins on balance.

This is still ‘out of Africa’ in the 19th century sense, it’s just not in the narrow “all modern humans evolved fully in Africa then left” way that some late 20th century anthropologists suggested.

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