Left us as the sole survivors (August 12 2012) Left us as the sole survivors (August 12 2012)

Christopher Brian Stringer the 65 year old British anthropologist, one of the leading proponents of the recent single-origin hypothesis or “Out of Africa” theory, has been interviewed by John Noble Wilford for the New York Times. Stringers hypothesizes that modern humans originated in Africa over 100,000 years ago and replaced the world’s archaic human species, such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals, after migrating within and then out of Africa to the non-African world within the last 50,000 to 100,000 years. During the interview Stringer states “…if we went back 100,000 years, which is very recent, geologically speaking, there might have been as many as six different kinds of humans on the earth. All those other kinds have disappeared, and left us as the sole survivors. … We evolved globally, all over the world. There was a view that in the different regions an earlier species, Homo erectus, evolved relatively seamlessly to modern humans. This idea was known as multiregionalism. The argument went that we remained one species throughout that evolutionary process, because there was interbreeding among the different populations. It meant that the Neanderthals in Europe, for example, would be the ancestors of modern Europeans; Homo erectus in China would be the ancestor of modern Asians. And Java Man would be a distant ancestor of modern Australian aboriginal populations. What we have seen since then is a growth in the fossil record, in our ability to date that record and to CT-scan fossils and get minute details out of them. DNA studies have had a huge impact on our field. We now have the genomes of Neanderthals and of these strange people in Siberia called the Denisovans.”

 

Inspired by New York Times ow.ly/cEILc image source Natural History Museum ow.ly/cEIye