Graecopithecus freybergi: Oldest Hominin Lived in Europe, not Africa there is the headline here is the link http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/graecopithecus-freybergi-hominin-04888.html “Our discovery outlines a new scenario for the beginning of human history,” ... “Furthermore, Graecopithecus freybergi is several hundred thousand years older than the oldest potential pre-human from Africa, the 6-7 million-year-old Sahelanthropus tchadensis from Chad.” etc. Your thoughts?
OK, we have a rival hypothesis, then. Fair enough. Let's see how this one fares under scrutiny. Eastern Med and E Africa are fairly close, geographically.
If the estimated dates are correct The Mediterranean see was beginning to dry out. Some sources indicate that there was increasing tectonic activity at roughly the same time, which, then, would have altered the climate.
The linked article goes into this. QUOTE “In summary, we reconstruct a savannah, which fits with the giraffes, gazelles, antelopes, and rhinoceroses that were found together with Graecopithecus freybergi,” said co-author Professor Nikolai Spassov, from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. “The incipient formation of a desert in North Africa more than seven million years ago and the spread of savannahs in Southern Europe may have played a central role in the splitting of the human and chimpanzee lineages,” Prof. Böhme said. UNQUOTE
I should like to ask Prof. Bohme how being physically separated from other great apes allowed humans to acquire 46 chromosomes instead of the 48 chromosome in ALL other great apes, by means of fusion of 2 chromosomes in a common ancestor? Moreover, there seems to be ample evidence that most migration occurred along the East and West coasts of Africa, where the river deltas and oceans always provided abundant food sources and crossing a desert wasn't necessary, to begin with.
Couple of thoughts. The first one is there are a some folks out there thinking something like, 'I knew white people were the first ones to evolve intelligence'.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Secondly, this finding has not gained much traction in the past 4 years, so we will have to see if more conclusive evidence can be unearthed. It could be that the initial split in the human/chimp lineages occurred in the Mediterranean and then the continued evolution of humans occurred in eastern Africa. Really interesting stuff!
OK My one exchemist joke A retired organic chemist was asked if he missed the work and he said: Not at all, actually I'm still very active in the field. I spend a lot of time converting whiskey, rum, brandy and tequila into urine.
My only quibble with that would be to replace "oldest hominin" with 'oldest currently known hominin'. I have long felt that human evolution was probably far more complex than the rather pat "out of Africa" stories suggest. Certainly a large part of it did seem to originate in Africa. But by the time of Homo erectus (and perhaps earlier if these latest claims pan out) hominins were leaving Africa a million years ago and populating all of Eurasia. I've always thought that it was exceedingly implausible that these earlier African emigrants suddenly stopped evolving or if they did evolve, only resulted in evolutionary dead-ends. So I'm more inclined to imagine that human evolution was happening all over, with migrations out of Africa and back migrations back in, relic populations sheltering in remote places (like the Flores hobbits), and all kinds of inter-breeding. That human evolution was far more complicated than current textbooks make it seem. And none of has very much to do with fluorine.
I still think there is one single indicator that suggests the time human split from the common ancestor. The fusion of chromosome 2p and 2q in the common ancestor into chromosome 2 ( twice the size) in humans . Evidence shows that all humans have 23 pr chromosomes, whereas all other apes have 24 or chromosomes. Human Chromosome 2 is a fusion of two ancestral chromosomes Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Conclusion http://www.evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm There is no evidence that normal incremental evolution took place, but there is evidence of a sudden increase in brain size and reasoning power, which points to a rare beneficial genetic mutation rather than gradual adaption to the environment. I believe this extraordinary mutation may be causal to the rapidly evolving reasoning ability brain and the definitive split in species from our common ancestor.
Whenever the the split occurred. I think there are several estimates of that, but the one that comes to mind is 6-8 million years ago. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Cranium of Sahelanthropus tchadensis: a 7 million year old member of the human evolutionary lineage from Chad. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA When and where did humans split from the apes to become a separate branch of bipeds? Are we an ape or not? If so, which of the living Great Apes is the closest to humans? https://theconversation.com/when-humans-split-from-the-apes-55104# To me that sounds reasonable because obviously the ability to grow larger brains dependent on several other physical factors which had to evolve before the human brain could fully develop into it's current size and shape. IMO, the chromosomal evidence is a compelling argument that the split must have come fairly soon after the mutation and the offspring acquired greater reasoning powers, such as use of fire, more sophisticated tool making, curiosity! These things must have evolved along with the development of the human brain and may have taken several million years . Early Stone Age Tools https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/stone-tools/early-stone-age-tools#
