Humans are a traveling species, and maybe they always have
been.
New evidence suggests that humans—or something very close to
humans—traveled out of Africa and into Asia far, far earlier than most modern
models suggests.
(Images: Two teeth that appear likely to be from anatomically
modern humans; paleoanthropologist Christopher Bae at a fossil dig. Credit:
University of Hawai`i at Mānoa.)
University of Hawai`i paleoanthropologist Christopher Bae,
is the lead author on a paper that reports on human remains from China that
date back roughly 125,000 years.
(Citation: Christopher J. Bae, Wei Wang, Jianxin Zhao,
Shengming Huang, Feng Tian and Guanjun Shen, Modern human teeth from Late
Pleistocene Luna Cave [Guangxi, China], DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2014.06.051)
Current theory has modern humans leaving Africa 60,000 years
ago, but Bae and his co-authors found human teeth dating to between 70 and
126,000 years ago. They found the material in the Lunadong cave in China’s Guangxi
Zhuang Autonomous Region, north of Vietnam.
It suggests there was not just one Out of Africa migration,
but at least two, and possibly several.
“The findings from the Lunadong study clearly indicate that
certain aspects of the Out of Africa model need to be rethought. That is, that
there was at least one other earlier Out of Africa migration event that
predated 60,000 years ago.
“This paleoanthropological find, in addition to other recent
studies from western and southern Asia, suggest that modern humans may have
dispersed out of Africa in multiple waves rather than as one major single
migration event 60,000 years ago as commonly thought,” said Bae, in aUniversity of Hawai`i press release.
There were numerous other human-like creatures traveling the
world from their African homeland far earlier than this. Neandertals, Homo erectus and others were clearly
moving across the landscape. Peking Man, whose remains were found in the 1920s
near Beijing, dates to more than half a million years ago. He is considered a
variety of Homo erectus.
© Jan TenBruggencate 2014
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