early hominid?

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by sculptor, Oct 20, 2017.

  1. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    The human-chimpanzee last-common ancestor has been variously dated at anywhere from 13 million to 4 million years ago. So this latest tooth does seem to fall within that range.

    It's interesting that it was found outside Africa.

    I'm inclined to agree with Sculptor that our current picture of human evolution is probably woefully simplistic. Things were probably far more complicated than we currently hypothesize. (Biology is always like that.)

    In particular, I don't see all of human evolution taking place in one favored place (Africa) and an out-of-Africa event as a mass exodus that suddenly populated the rest of Eurasia with more or less finished humans. I'm more inclined to imagine lots of tiny hunter-gatherer bands of individuals of many different sorts (some more human, some less) kind of continually leaking out of Africa over long periods of time. Some probably went east into Yemen and South Asia. Others probably went northeast into Israel and the Levant, then into Europe and Central Asia perhaps. (Neanderthals and Denisovans may be descended from these.) Others may have crossed the Straits of Gibraltar.

    Tracing the detailed histories of these small widely-dispersed populations and the extent to which their decendants interbred with later more anatomically modern arrivals might be very hard to reconstruct.
     
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  3. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    (justaguess)
    I could take that a little further
    Tortonian Europe mainly had humid to sub-humid summers and no arid climate has been conclusively detected. The fossil records also indicate that the genus Castanopsis had a wide distribution in Central Europe during the Miocene (Castanopsis is a tropical or subtropical tree)

    So, instead of "out of Africa" it could well be into Africa, for some of our ancestor's ancestors, during the beginning of the northern hemisphere's ice age.

    for Tortonian European climate see: https://www.researchgate.net/figure...and-sea-level-pressure-anomalies-Pa-to-global
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The idea that someone might find evidence of apes of all kinds all over the prime ape habitat of the Eurasian landmass that existed before the onset of the ice seems completely unremarkable. There are descendants of them in SE Asia still. Why would anyone assume otherwise?

    That would have little or nothing to do with the "Out of Africa" hypothesis for humans and their immediate lineage (or the "Cradle of Mankind" elaboration on it). That all happened millions of years later, in hypothesis.

    Everything before bipedalism is chimpanzee evolution.
     
    Last edited: Oct 23, 2017
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  7. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    " completely unremarkable" What are your bases ? Prior USSR domain collapse there was hardly any exploration. and the Siberian territory is large and so Chinese territory is large also they were not explored .
    so who are we to say the out of Africa is the final.
     
  8. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    I frankly believe this is just about racism. Some white people just can't stand the thought that everyone alive today is a descendant of Africans. White people are just 'bleached' Africans.
     
  9. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Regarding rarity. Lee Berger, Wits U., Johannesburg, lead a team that found over 1,500 bones of one single hominid, Homo naledi, in 2015. He also found several skeletons of an australopithecus-type back in '08. Lots of looking yet to be done.
     
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  10. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I think that it's just biologically unlikely that human evolution only occurs on one favored continent. I agree that the evidence is that the earliest evolution of the human line took place in Africa. That's where our ancestral line probably split from the apes' ancestors, where humans descended from the trees and took up walking bipedally. But I expect that when things like Homo erectus left Africa (they appear to have been in Asia at least 1.7 million years ago), that their migration led to a spurt in their evolution, not to its cessation. Reproductive isolation and migration into new environmental conditions would almost guarantee that, as with Darwin's Galapagos finches. Nor am I convinced that all of the evolutionary products of human evolution outside Africa, such as Neanderthals, Denisovans and the Flores hobbits, were all abortive.

    I'm becoming inclined to think that all kinds of human-evolutionary developments might have occurred outside Africa and that some of the products of this bred back into the anatomically modern human line. Evidence is accumulating that Neanderthals shared genes with us. I expect the same is true of the Denisovans. And I expect that there are many other populations like these around Eurasia that are currently unknown. These were small hunter-gatherer bands, populations weren't dense and their bones are probably going to be very hard to find.

    If you go back far enough, I expect that everyone is.

    But wouldn't an politico-ideological insistence on the idea that human evolution only occurs in Africa fit the agenda of those who want to believe that Africa is the place where we should look to find the least evolved humans, the sort of relic populations that everyone else rose from?

    It seems to me that if somebody wants to draw "racist" conclusions, that they can do that regardless of how the history of human evolution is imagined. Our scientific understanding should be a function of scientific considerations, not political or moral ones.
     
    Last edited: Oct 24, 2017
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  11. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    I doubt anyone thinks that. As far as I know Neanderthals evolved in Europe and have not been found in Africa at all.
     
  12. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    And also around Africa.
    And migrating between Africa and Eurasia. Continually. For a million years.
    So that the modern pre-Euro Africans are also products of this - just as, exactly as, the pre-Euro Australians and South Americans and Hawaiians and Micronesians and Japanese and Andaman Islanders and Sami and Swedes are.
    They could, sure. Meanwhile, we are faced with what they actually do.
     
  14. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    as/re post 22
    alternately phrased:
    During the time that the original owner of the aforementioned tooth central Europe was subtropical or tropical.
    This lasted for millions of years during which time the people of the original owner of the tooth multiplied and evolved.
    and then
    came the ice age and those who could migrated south
    By the time of the first identified homo. the glacier times saw most of Europe as a tundra.
    so the pressure then was on moving to warmer climes including the Mediterranean and Africa.
    Along the way, it seems most likely that populations who had not known each other found themselves together on their journey south, away from the cold. So,they interbred and shared some of their mutations.

    What seems most likely is that the preiceage population was rather large and spread out, but suffered from the increasing aridity and cold, reducing their numbers along with their habitable land, by this time, we're seeing Australopithecus, and shortly thereafter, homo.
    It has been theorized that radical and fast changes in climate lead to mutations which aid survival under those harsh conditions.

    I see no reason the preclude the descendants of the original owner of the tooth from being part of that journey into the south including africa.
     
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    These were not bipedal apes - at least, there is absolutely no evidence they were, and plenty to cast doubt.
    If they had been, of course, they would not have been as isolated as all that to begin with.
    And since they weren't, they weren't migrating long distances in person - their populations were shifting, generation by generation, following the food and the forest. A traveling extinction wave, if you will.
    The first identified precursor to a fully bipedal ape was already in Africa. So were all its descendants and relatives. They weren't north in the first place, as far as any - any - evidence shows; they spread north (and south) from their origins.
    As are the forest apes today.
    in northern Asia and Europe
    in Africa, where things have been wetter and warmer in general all along.

    Emerging from Africa, both of them. Every known bipedal ape.
     
  16. RADII Registered Senior Member

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    Why would you play the 'race' card? No one else has, nor can I detect a hint of it anywhere in the current discussion! Some 'nationalism' apparently being raised in the questioning of 'out of Africa' but there's been no race.
     
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  17. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    There are always people who think in terms of race. The Chinese like to think that their people came from a hominin that arose in China. Some folks in the US favor the Out-of-Anywhere-but-Africa school of thought.
     
  18. RADII Registered Senior Member

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    136
    I don't dispute the capacity for xenophobia or ignorance of our kind. I just wondered why it was raised as a non sequitur in this discussion.
     
  19. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    I got the impression they were required. I could be wrong.
     
  20. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    I thought it was appropriate.
    I don't need someone else to bring up a specific point before I put in my 2 cents. I didn't accuse anyone of racism, but I do believe racism is part of the search to find a non-African origin of man. [Shrug]
     
  21. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    IMHO:
    "Out of africa" is a simplistic construct which appeals to simple minds.

    The interesting ting about archaeology is that the next shovel may reverse previous beliefs.

    http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0177127

    But there's another significant finding: that human split occurred in the eastern Mediterranean and not Africa, as it is believed.\(previously posted in another thread)
    http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/7-2-million-year-old-pre-human-1.4124407

    and from Crete:
    The discovery of the Trachilos footprints, which are at least 5.6 million years old and thus approximately 2 million years older than the hominin trackways from Laetoli, suggests a more complex reality.

    “Human feet have a very distinctive shape, different from all other land animals,” the study authors explained.
    “The combination of a long sole, five short forward-pointing toes without claws, and a hallux (‘big toe’) that is larger than the other toes, is unique.”
    “The feet of our closest relatives, the great apes, look more like a human hand with a thumb-like hallux that sticks out to the side.”
    “The Laetoli footprints, thought to have been made by Australopithecus, are quite similar to those of modern humans except that the heel is narrower and the sole lacks a proper arch. By contrast, the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus from Ethiopia, the oldest hominin known from reasonably complete fossils, has an ape-like foot.”
    “Paleoanthropologists who described Ardipithecus argued that it is a direct ancestor of later hominins, implying that a human-like foot had not yet evolved at that time.”
    http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/trachilos-hominin-like-footprints-05185.html

    and
    Graecopithecus freybergi: Oldest Hominin Lived in Europe, not Africa

    An international team of paleoanthropologists, led by Professor Madelaine Böhme of the University of Tübingen, Germany, has analyzed 7.2 million-year-old remains of the hominin Graecopithecus freybergi and came to the conclusion that they belong to pre-humans.
    http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/graecopithecus-freybergi-hominin-04888.html

    I see no evidence that proves the location of the major evolutionary steps from hominid to hominin.
     
    Last edited: Oct 26, 2017
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    There isn't much difference between the "eastern Mediterranean" and the African regions of standard hypothesis. That's an easy walk for a hominin - especially a shoreline adapted, quasi-amphibious one.
    The question is not whether it is oversimple (that's a given) but whether it is essentially wrong (which nothing points to).

    This, for example: is an amendment to this conventional wisdom
    not the simplistic "African origin" itself.
    The idea that bipedalism, once developed, immediately allowed wide and rapid dispersal, supports rather than discomfits the basic "out of Africa" lineage we see in the genetics, the hominid fossils, and the apparent distribution patterns of hominins.
     
  23. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    ice
    Did you not notice that the Crete footprints are at least 2,000,000 years older than the Laetoli footprints?
    So we have evidence that hominins evolved at least 2,000,000 years earlier in Europe than in Africa.
    That is this years evidence..........................but wait, another shovel is poised to turn up something new that is even older.
    Crete to Laetoli ---up through Grece and around, then down to Laetoli is well over 10,000 km. (assuming a 1 meter stride), that is over 10,000,000 steps....
    OK
    so, we have a 9.7 million year old tooth from Germany, 7.2 million year old teeth from Greece, and then 5.6 million year old (bipedal) footprints on Crete .....................................Remember that it started getting colder in Europe circa 7 million years ago.---A 4-5 million year change from tropical and subtropical forests to tundra.................
    Citing only these findings, it surely seems like a southbound migration away from the increasing northern cold.

    but wait
    another shovel is poised
     

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