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Humans First Arose in Asia? 622

Posted by Zonk from the i'm-lost dept.
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 ... '"
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Humans First Arose in Asia? More

Humans First Arose in Asia?

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  • and humans.

  • Except for the other guys... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Krach42 ( 227798 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @03:45PM (#14366428) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • That's pretty much what they're claiming.

      • Re:Except for the other guys... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Krach42 ( 227798 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:04PM (#14366559) Homepage Journal
        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 (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Markus Registrada ( 642224 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @10:23PM (#14368460)
          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.

          • Re:Already solved (Score:4, Interesting)

            by radtea ( 464814 ) on Saturday December 31, 2005 @01:12PM (#14370801)
            (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.)

            Your argument would be stronger if there were any non-controversial evidence for H. erectus in Australia:

            http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/kowswamp.html [talkorigins.org]

            But I take that to be an unfortunately-choosen hypothetical example, rather than an actual error.

            Your position is not entirely-dissimilar to the old The Multiregional Evolution Model: http://www.geocities.com/palaeoanthropology/Herect us.html [geocities.com]

            Gene complexes hardly ever travel without organisms wrapped around them, so what you seem to be arguing for is a specific mechanism for multi-regional evolution. It isn't impossible, but whatever happened is radically under-determined by the data, and it is very likely that we are quite wrong about at least some major components of any story we tell about human evolution.

            For example, it is virtually certain that H. sapiens evolved much earlier than the earliest currently-known examples, simply because the sampling rate due to fossilazation and discovery is so fantastically low. The sum total of H. sapiens fossils antedating 10000 years ago is only a few dozen, out of hundreds of thousands or more inviduals who lived over the early history of our species. The odds of us just happening to have found a skeleton from the very earliest period, when the smallest numbers of individuals would be around, is very unlikely.

            Indeed, the apparent concordance between the current "earliest human skeleton" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/0502 23122209.htm [sciencedaily.com]) and the most-likely genetic date based on mitocondrial DNA is so improbable as to be disturbing.

            I am therefore betting we will eventually find that H. sapiens evolved much earlier, but went through a genetic bottleneck 200,000 years ago, giving us our most recent common ancestor. Such bottlenecks can be seen in a lot of North American fauna, where you frequently see populations that can be traced back to a single, small, non-diverse population 10,000 years ago that was in a geographically-restricted range due to the last ice age.

    • Re:Except for the other guys... (Score:5, Informative)

      by slavemowgli ( 585321 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:02PM (#14366551) Homepage
      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... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Krach42 ( 227798 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:08PM (#14366589) Homepage Journal
        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... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Fiver- ( 169605 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:12PM (#14366628)
      Can't we just look for the region of the world that has a large concentration of talking snakes?
    • The interesting part is this idea is very retro. In the earliest days, they thought that humans came from asia, not aftrica, this was when Java man was the big deal. Then over time things shifted to africa. So it's just a flip flop. Though clearly the mass body of researchers haven't switched to asia over this.

    • Re:Except for the other guys... (Score:5, Informative)

      by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:40PM (#14366810) Homepage Journal
      "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.
      • 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.

        This is not Roebroeks and Dennell's hypothesis. They propose that the "Out of Africa 1" theory where Homo ergaster/erectus migrates out of africa 1.8 Myear ago is wrong. Instead they propose that an earlier more primitive humanoid migrated out of africa earlier and that Homo erectus evolved in asia and then back migr

  • Does this imply that either -

    A. Humans got to North America before we previously thought (I find this unlikely, because it requires an earlier russo-alaskan bridge)

    B. Asia just got a massive head start?

    So what's the proposed spread of humanity now - Asia => Africa & Europe, then to North & South America?

    • Re:Interesting. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mrbooze ( 49713 )
      Poor Australia, nobody ever remembers you.
    • The russo-alaskan bridge theory is apparently pretty shaky anyway, archeologists are convinced some South American civilizations were around before the land bridge. The book 1491 [amazon.com] has a good summary of current knowledge.

      • Re:Interesting. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MightyMartian ( 840721 )
        The current theory still holds that modern Native Americans are very largely descended from Siberian peoples crossing Beringia (the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska). What has changed is the recognition that there were earlier migrants who came to the Americas before an ice-free route from Beringia into the interior of North America was available. There is a good deal of evidence that there were ice-free pockets along the coastline and that earlier populations managed to get into the Americas via bo

    • Re:Interesting. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 )
      Well, on the issue of Humans getting to North America, there is a huge margin as to when they got here. The Clovis points are the oldest flint tools associated with the North American Clovis culture. They date to the Paleo-Indian period around 13,500 years ago. Some archaeologists have found similarities between the Solutean in what is now the south of France and the later Clovis culture of North America and suggested that the Solutreans crossed the Ice Age Atlantic by moving along the pack ice edge using s

  • Pfft. (Score:5, Funny)

    by big_groo ( 237634 ) <groovisNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday December 30, 2005 @03:47PM (#14366436) Homepage
    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.

  • Didn't the first humans migrate from Mars on asteroids? Or was it DC-8's? Whichever one wasn't on SOuth Park.

    • NO! (Score:5, Funny)

      by PixelScuba ( 686633 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:06PM (#14366571)
      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

  • Wow, just wow. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rude Turnip ( 49495 ) <valuation AT gmail DOT com> on Friday December 30, 2005 @03:49PM (#14366457)
    Amazing, even human evolution is getting outsourced to Asia!
  • ...was an extrememly hot babe. Hotter than any babe that has existed since. Then a genetic abberation caused geeks to appear and people became less hot. Except for Carmen Electra.

  • Proof of Intelligent Design (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheBogie ( 941620 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @03:57PM (#14366507) Journal
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Mons ter [wikipedia.org]

    Wasn't spaghetti invented in Asia?

  • Not completely unreasonable (Score:4, Interesting)

    by clambake ( 37702 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @03:59PM (#14366521) Homepage
    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.
    • If the first civilization arrose in Asia, then it is not a completely abberational jump to say that humans started around there.

      Actually, it might be quite a jump. Evolution seems to only occur in harsher conditions. Civilization seems to require surplus (time left to sit on ones but and think about things). So Africa, where life is harsher is more likely to be an evolutionary force that caused humana to evolve. Humans then migrated to places where it was easier to live and started a civilization. O

    • Re: Not completely unreasonable (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) * on Friday December 30, 2005 @05:32PM (#14367145)
      > 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.

      The problem is, regional DNA sampling world-wide has given us a pretty good map of the spread of modern human from Africa. If they originated in Asia, we've really missed something.

      Google for WorldMigrations.pdf to see an example.

      • Another point to consider is that this idea that humans arose in Asia has a long history. Traditionally, scholars thought humans arose in Asia because according to the Bible Paradise was in the East. Doesn't mean this has anything to do with it, but once these memes get ingrained in society they pop up from time to time.

        If humans started in Asia then maybe we just haven't found a suitable fossil site as rich as those in Africa. However, for my money I'm betting on Africa. Where are the nastiest parasites o

  • In parallel? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chill ( 34294 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:03PM (#14366553) Journal
    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
    • Wouldn't it be possible that pre-humans migrated to different locations and finished their evolution separately?

      Because we are all so very similar genetically - it suggests common descent.

    • Re:In parallel? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ken Broadfoot ( 3675 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:08PM (#14366594) Homepage Journal
      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? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by myowntrueself ( 607117 )
        Indeed, I've often felt like the different so-called 'races' of humankind are really no more than huge extended families. No difference, nothing to see here except family resemblances.

    • Re:In parallel? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by deathcloset ( 626704 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:31PM (#14366752) Journal
      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.
      • It's trickier than that. It's highly unlikely that there was only one woman. (Your post doesn't explicitly make that claim, but a lot of people misunderstand the subject to mean that.) It's possible for there to have been lots and lots of women, but because mitochondria are only passed from women to children, and because roughly half the kids are boys, it's possible to have, over a fifteen or twenty generation sequence, only one woman's mitochondria passed through. I'm working from "Patterns In Evolutio

  • Early joke forms (Score:4, Funny)

    by CDOS_CDOS run ( 669823 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:08PM (#14366587)
    So an early asian humanoid and a early african humanoid walk into a bar...

  • birthplace (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hostingreviews ( 941757 )
    What puzzles me is how remote volcanic islands became inhabited. Hawaii for example. Theres no way early man could have sailed there.

    • Re:birthplace (Score:3, Informative)

      by quokkapox ( 847798 )
      Er? The Polynesians [wikipedia.org] sailed all over the place in the Pacific Ocean long before Columbus and Cortez and the rest of the Europeans. See also Easter Island [wikipedia.org].
    • Actually, polynesian ocean voyages are quite well documented. And Hawaii has only been inhabited for 1500-2000 years, IIRC.

    • Re:birthplace (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mrbooze ( 49713 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:42PM (#14366821)
      There are few modern human traits more galling than this belief that "early man" was a primitive idiot who was lucky to not piss on his own feet.

      It so often ends up underpinning stupid theories about aliens building pyramids or landing strips and whatnot. All because the idea that those "primitive savages" could have understood concepts like engineering or surveying (or in this case, sailing) is so unbelievable to them.

      • Re:birthplace (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ultramk ( 470198 ) <ultramk@noSPAm.pacbell.net> on Friday December 30, 2005 @05:41PM (#14367202)
        I suspect that one of the reasons for this is simple... most of their tools and cultural artifacts were made of organic substances: wood, leather, bone and horn. Thus they simply didn't leave a lot for us to find that survived the millennia.

        Therefore, people have this image of naked, tool-less man-apes drooling on themselves. Silly. Ancient peoples were (at most) only marginally less clever than ourselves... and I'm willing to bet that living without technology in an environment that's constantly trying to kill you would be conducive to some pretty amazing problem solving.

        Besides, for something like sailing, you don't need everyone to succeed. They may have failed ten thousand times before a breeding population finally survived. The arch of time is vast.

        m-

  • What I don't understand... (Score:3, Funny)

    by kjart ( 941720 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:14PM (#14366642)
    Why isn't everyone driving around at 20 mph with their turning signal on?

  • Doesn't "feel" right - but let the data decide. (Score:3, Funny)

    by deathcloset ( 626704 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:14PM (#14366644) Journal
    It seems that the large, flat expanses of Africa are more conducive to the evolution of bipedal locomotion; which is the most effecient form of leg-based movement for endurance and traversing long distances (bepedalism is essentially a pendulum).

    Asia does have it's fair share of flat expanses of course, but the amazing flora and fauna of Africa, the diversity thereof and climate change data still seems to point to an evolutionary hotspot on the globe.

    Nevertheless, let's not fall into the mindset where alternative theories are tossed aside simply because they don't "feel" right.

    Meteor crater in Arizona was once thought to have been caused by lava and steam - but now we know it was created by an intelligent designer ;)

    oh I kid, I kid!

  • Can't get it out of my head... (Score:4, Funny)

    by katterjohn ( 726348 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:23PM (#14366703)
    I'm turning Japanese
    I think I'm turning Japanese
    I really think so

  • Why migrate? (Score:4, Funny)

    by beforewisdom ( 729725 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @04:33PM (#14366764)
    Were they looking for I.T. jobs?

  • The whole story (Score:3, Funny)

    by Stan Vassilev ( 939229 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @05:09PM (#14367003)
    They arose in Asia, but were quickly deemed illegal monopoly and split in several pieces accross the world.

  • Genetic evidence says Africa (Score:5, Informative)

    by brit74 ( 831798 ) on Friday December 30, 2005 @06:12PM (#14367373)
    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]

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