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For years, scientists believed that humans were living in one place in Africa and that this broad band of people was spreading around the world.
It's like there was a "Garden of Eden".
But a new study says that the fossil record does not support the complete formation of humans as they spread throughout the world.
On the contrary, early humans had a huge variation in the sizes and shapes of their heads. a series of genetic and cultural changes that have led to modern humanity.
The primitive skulls and bones of homo sapiens do not show a linear progression from primitive to modern.
Instead, development is more fragmented. thousands of years before all humans start to look like what we are doing today.
The DNA studies of modern Africans – the most genetically diverse continent on Earth – paint a similar picture.
The continents are so different that they have had to be separated for enormous periods of time.
Scientists now suggest that there have been multiple areas where different groups of humans have developed different physical characteristics
crossed over millennia. It is only then that modern humans as we know them developed.
The fossil record suggests that early homo sapiens were a mosaic of different groups.
Dr. Eleanor Scerri, archaeologist at the University of Oxford Guardian: "This unique view of the unique population has remained in the minds of people … but the way we have it thought is too simplistic. "
Modern humans have small, thin faces, large round cervicals, and chins. 19659002] If these features only developed in one group of humans, one could expect to see a series of skulls ranging from larger faces to smaller faces, and larger, rounder cervicals.
For example, skulls dating from 300,000 years ago found at Djebel Irhoud in Morocco – have small faces like modern humans.
But instead of a spherical brain, theirs is long and elongated. Homo sapiens exhibition The artifacts of Kenya reveal the distant past of mankind
'COMPLEX MIXING OF ARCHAETICAL FEATURES & # 39;
Meanwhile, the earliest human fossils dating more recently from 160,000 years ago – to Herto in Ethiopia – had large 'sturdy' faces – unlike us – but with globular cervicals such as ours.
Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum and Dr. Scerri presented the case in Trends Ecology and Evolution
The authors stated that early humans were largely separated by a combination of diverse habitats and changing environmental boundaries, such as forests and deserts.
Many of the most inhospitable regions of Africa today, such as the Sahara was once wet and green, with interlaced networks of lakes and rivers, and abundant wildlife.
Similarly, some humid, green tropical areas were once arid.
Due to the nature of these habitable areas, human populations would have gone through many cycles of isolation
which has led to local adaptation and development of unique primitive technologies – tools of stone – and genetic constitution
. The large human population has developed in Africa and has spread around the world – but now it admits that it does not correspond to the facts.
He said that when we look at human bones over the last 300,000 years, we see a complex mix of archaic and modern features. and at different times. We see a continent-wide trend towards the modern human form, but some archaic features are present until recently. "
With regard to the development of stone tools, the model is also mixed.
Sometimes sophisticated tools appear later in the fossil record, while more recent tools appear more recently – suggesting innovations occurring at different places on the map at different times.
Professor Chris Stringer adds, "Although I am a researcher who originally helped to develop the idea that our species, Homo sapiens, was from Africa, I realized more and more that our African origin was a complex process.
"The great diversity of African fossils between 200,000 and 400,000 years ago It suggests that multiple lineages existed on the African continent at that time. "
Dr. Scerri, stated that the stone tools discovered throughout Africa do not show either a clear progression from crude to sophistic
She added that even if there is" a trend on the continental scale "to greater sophistication over time, she stated that this" modernization "was clearly not coming from a region or was not occurring at a given moment. [19659002] Professor Mark Thomas has said that genetic patterns found in contemporary Africans also support the idea.
He said: "It is difficult to reconcile the genetic patterns we see in living Africans, and in DNA extracted from the bones of Africans who have lived in the last 10,000 years, with an ancestral human population. "
Dr. Scerri said:" The evolution of human populations in Africa was multi-regional. Our ancestry was multiethnic. And the evolution of our material culture was, well, multi-cultural. "
More on this: The human origin a stew that still cooks
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