Humans First Arose in Asia?

IZ Reloaded writes "Two archaeologists are proposing the idea that early humans first arose in Asia instead of Africa as previously thought. These early humans then migrate out of Asia to parts of the world. From National Geographic: 'The unresolved status of the intriguing Flores finds attributed to H. floresiensis leaves open the possibility that this species is the end result and last survivor of an ancient migration of very primitive humans, or even prehumans, that formerly existed more widely across Asia ... '"

Except for the other guys...

[Krach42 (227798)]

We have tons of data points showing homo sapiens evolved in Africa. So many of the missing links like Lucy and other members of the homo tree have all been found in Africa.

I'm not debating their points (I've not read the article yet), but it would seem to require us to throw out the data that we already have. If homo species migrated to the rest of the world from Asia, then it would have requires Lucy, a relatively primitive human to have gotten to Africa, then start a long series of descendents and multiple branches of evolution there, eventually resulting in homo sapiens.

Re:Except for the other guys...

[slavemowgli (585321)]

Actually, it seems like they're proposing that humans (or, rather, their ancestors) migrated from Asia to Africa *before* what we already know about, so the two theories don't rule each other out. It all just depends on where you draw the line between "human" and "not quite human yet".

Re:Except for the other guys...

[Krach42 (227798)]

Yeah, after having read the article, it appears that they're pushing for that kind of an interpretation.

Most accurately, the scientists are saying we can't rule out that they might have come from Asia (the area near Georgia, not far east Asia) since the conditions there were very much the same as they were in Africa millions of years ago.

It's more like the scientists are saying "this is a possibility that is being exposed more and more," and of course the media jumps on it as usual with "OMG, this scientist is asking if we might be from Asia." Presenting it as if the scientiests are more confident about their probability than they likely actually are.

Re:Except for the other guys...

[Fiver- (169605)]

Can't we just look for the region of the world that has a large concentration of talking snakes?

Re:Except for the other guys...

[Ender_Stonebender (60900)]

That wasn't a snake. It was the Noodly Appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (The rest of the FSM was hiding further up the tree.) Oh, and it wasn't an apple that was offered to Eve - it was a tomato.

--Ender

Re:Except for the other guys...

[lawpoop (604919)]

"I'm not debating their points (I've not read the article yet), but it would seem to require us to throw out the data that we already have."

No, it doesn't.

It just asks us to start looking in Asia also. "All the evidence" comes from Africa because all the digs are happening in Africa. Archaeology and paleontology are sciences which suffer from heavy biases in their observations. First off, what are the chances that any bone would become a fossil? Slim to none. Secondly, we can't ramdonly sample the whole earth's surface with dig teams. We dig in places where the lead researcher "has a good feeling", or gets word from a local farmer about strange rocks.

"If homo species migrated to the rest of the world from Asia, then it would have requires Lucy, a relatively primitive human to have gotten to Africa, then start a long series of descendents and multiple branches of evolution there, eventually resulting in homo sapiens."

Lucy, who was an Australopithecus afarensis (way before people -- not even Homo or same as us ) stays in Africa, as does her descendants, A. garhi.

Her even later descendents Homo erectus, H. habilis, or neanderthalis wanders out into Asia and becomes H. sapiens, who in turn wanders back to Africa, and of course, the rest of the world. Note that fossils of H. erectus, which is considered to be two species before modern humans, were found in Dragonbone cave in China [pbs.org].

A good understanding of this wikipedia entry for human evolution [wikipedia.org] might help you understand the situation.

Re:Except for the other guys...

[Krach42 (227798)]

Actually, after having RTFA, the article is somewhat sensationalised.

First, they do not doubt that H. erectus came out of Africa, it's very well established that it did. The issue with that, is that H. sapiens are believed to have had H. erectus as ancestors. So "humans" in so far as it means H. sapiens, came from Africa to the best possible explaination that anyone has.

The issue here is that they're discussing where other hominids came from, and where the hominids that evolved in Africa came from.

If they did mean Asia, then it would mean somewhere near the modern country of Georgia, not far east Asia, or middle east Asia. Just plain "Asia" (it's pretty easy to forget that many Russians are Asians, not Europeans)

Since they know those areas of Asia to have been covered with similar Savannahs as Africa during about 1.8 some million years ago, they say that you can't rule out that early hominids could have been thriving in that area, or that hominids didn't actually come from that area, and just had an early migration into Africa.

They point to H. floresiensis, saying that it was likely a terminating evolutionary point of an orphaned hominid line independent of African evolutionary heritage.

Already solved

[Markus Registrada (642224)]

It's surprising that this comes out now. The origins of modern humanity were explicated just a few months ago, and the loose ends have already been tied up.

The problem has always been that there are two sorts of strong evidence: humans are almost all alike, and humans evolved in place. (E.g. early Australians were H. erectus; later they had mixed erectus and sap. characteristics; eventually the erectus features faded and vanished, leaving pure H. sap.) Naturally each had adherents who preferred to discount the others' evidence. The two have certainly seemed contradictory, up until now.

They were both right. What spread out of Africa was not actual populations of H. sap. etc., supplanting H. erectus populations that preceded them. Rather, successful gene complexes that define H. sap. spread out of Africa, upgrading local populations in-place. (Think of them as software patches.) Hardly anybody had to migrate any farther than the next village over. People married into neighboring villages, bringing their genetic advances with them, and the next generation brought them to the next village along. Of course successful genes could spread back to Africa, too, but Africa had the most variation, so produced more of the successful genes, and packaged them with more other, complementary genes.

Contrast this with the spread of agriculture into Europe, where there's evidence of farmers actually supplanting hunter/gatherers; and of course the historical record, with wholesale slaughters and genocides. (No doubt there was plenty of slaughtering earlier, but it takes technology, language, and civilized infantilization for genocides to be conducted efficiently.)

It doesn't seem like there are many other species in which this process would have worked. Bears, maybe.

Pfft.

[big_groo (237634)]

New Asian finds are significant, they say, especially the 1.75 million-year-old small-brained early-human fossils found in ...

You can find that almost anywhere. Like here - browse at -1, for example.

Wow, just wow.

[Rude Turnip (49495)]

Amazing, even human evolution is getting outsourced to Asia!

Not completely unreasonable

[clambake (37702)]

The earliest known pottery, some 20~30,000 years old, is found in Japan and China (every couple of years one side or the other finds an even older one). Pottery indicates civilization, simply because nomadic hunter gatherer type people don't have a lot of time to sit down, find suitable clay, mold it, and build a firing kiln, and pottery doesn't trvel particularly well to boot.

If the first civilization arrose in Asia, then it is not a completely abberational jump to say that humans started around there. Still would need a lot of investigation, of course.

In parallel?

[chill (34294)]

Wouldn't it be possible that pre-humans migrated to different locations and finished their evolution separately? Considering Neandrathals are no longer considered in a direct evolutionary line to modern humans, that indicates a separate branch of evolution.

Distinctly different environments, like Asia and Africa, could account for something like this. Multiple evolutionary paths, occurring in multiple physical locations on the planet. Why do scientists seem so attached to the "Eve" theory?

  -Charles

Re:In parallel?

[Ken Broadfoot (3675)]

We are attached to the Eve theory because we can bear children with any different human race on the planet. Separate evolutions would have lead to speciation. And speciation precludes baby makin'.

--ken

   

Re:In parallel?

[Shihar (153932)]

It is believed that at one point the population of the human race was knocked down to a few thousand. This is backed up with genetic testing. Humans are extremely similar in terms of genetics. There is more difference between two random humans in the same race, then there is between two average humans of different races. In other words, if were to average all the genetics of each individual race, you would find that they are more similar to each other then difference you find between humans due to natural variation. It is pretty conclusive that humans all descend from the same few thousand people.

Re:In parallel?

[deathcloset (626704)]

The "Eve" theory is evidenced by mitochondrial DNA [wikipedia.org].

We are all related to some nice lady from about 150,000 years ago. that's EVERYONE, mind you.

DNA doesn't lie. Modern homosapiens are all from the same place.

Early joke forms

[CDOS_CDOS run (669823)]

So an early asian humanoid and a early african humanoid walk into a bar...

Can't get it out of my head...

[katterjohn (726348)]

I'm turning Japanese
I think I'm turning Japanese
I really think so

Why migrate?

[beforewisdom (729725)]

Were they looking for I.T. jobs?

Genetic evidence says Africa

[brit74 (831798)]

The article talks quite a bit about fossil evidence, but what about the genetic evidence? If you look at the variability of human genetics, you find that europeans aren't very genetically diverse. Similarly, American Indians aren't very genetically diverse, and Asians aren't either. Africans, on the other hand, are very genetically diverse. What this indicates is that the human race' history in Africa goes back much further than anywhere else. It appears that a subset of Africans left Africa and colonized the rest of the world. Here's a short article that talks about human genetic diversity compared to their location: http://info.med.yale.edu/genetics/kkidd/point.html [yale.edu] http://www.umich.edu/news/?Releases/2005/Oct05/r10 1805 [umich.edu]

Re:On the first day..

[undeadly (941339)]

I mean life is too complicated to arise by chance, right? I just don't want to believe I'm related to an animal renound for picking shit out of it's ass.

You feel that beeing releated to Slashdotter regulars is an improvement?

Re:On the first day..

[Ruff_ilb (769396)]

Ah yes, but religion is so CONVENIENT. It means that often the believer needs to make no personal moral decisions (your religion makes absolute moral decisions for you), and everyone's split into two camps: People that are going to Heaven (usually believers) and people that are going to Hell (usually everyone else). Often the sheer convenience and lifelong training in a religion overrides a personal quest for scientific truth.

Furthurmore, in times where science would say to you "Hey man, you're 100% screwed!" religion can give a more optimistic answer. It's easy to decry religion when you're sitting in front of your LCD or CRT, but it's can give hope to the otherwise hopeless if they think that an all-powerful, all-knowing being is watching over their backs ready to send them to paradise when they die.

I have no problem with religion whatsoever. However, I think that religion should stay in churches (for example) and science should stay in schools, universities, etc. Everything has its time and place.

Re:On the first day..

[Audigy (552883)]

> Take a look at your dollar bills "In god we thrust"

*chuckle*
ZOMG TORRENT PLS!!!

NO!

[PixelScuba (686633)]

Evil Lord Xenu froze all the alien races and dumped them into volcanoes here on earth. Their souls were collected by soul vacuumes and then forced to watch movies and be brainwashed, only to then inhabit the bodies of primitive man. I think that's how it goes, I still have to pay for a few more audit councelings before my thetan levels are capable of truly grasping this profound knowledge

Re:Pasta, gunpowder...

[honeypotslash (927312)]

and sony rootkits.
--
Free PlayStation 3 [freepay.com]

Re:It doesn't matter...

[damsa (840364)]

I dunno about western culture. Here in the Northwest region of America, every block there is either Indian, Sushi, Thai, Teriyaki or Chinese food. If you watch movies like the Matrix, you see Asian influenced martial arts. If you play video games you are most likely playing a Nintendo or a Playstation. If you watch cartoons, you are most likely watching a Japanese animated story.

It's a myth that the Chinese didn't use gun powder as weapons. In fact they did. In fact the idea of a Chinese person is also a myth. It's like the myth of an American person. That's why they are successful. They were one of the first places that took disparate groups and held it under one rule as one people, even though quite a few of the inhabitants spoke different languages and were of differerent "races". You might argue that the Romans did that as well, but they failed to hold on to it.