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For years, archaeologist Huw Groucutt and his team had driven one particular stretch of desert on their way to dig sites in Saudi Arabia. As they drove they caught glimpses of what looked like bones, emerging from the slowly eroding sand. Finally, in 2014, the team decided to explore the array of bones at Al Wusta. Within two years, amidst more than 800 fossilized animal bones and nearly 400 stone artifacts, they discovered something remarkable: the middle digit of a finger bone, from what appeared to be a modern human.
Anatomically modern, that is. The fossilized finger dated to at least 85,000 years ago.
[...] The discovery is “a dream come true, because it supports arguments that our teams have been making for more than 10 years,” said archaeologist Michael Petraglia, another co-author of the study, in a press conference. “This find together with other finds in the last few years suggests that modern humans, Homo sapiens, are moving out of Africa multiple times during many windows of opportunity in the last 100,000 years or so.”
The question of how humans left Africa has been debated ever since it became widely accepted that Homo sapiens did indeed evolve from ancestral species in Africa, rather than Asia. (That latter hypothesis was proposed by scientists like Ernst Haeckel, and preferred by many anthropologists until as recently as 60 years ago; some modern researchers still argue for multiple evolutionary jumping off points, based on fossil finds in China). In the past decade, some geneticists have argued for a single dispersal event from Africa around 60,000 years ago, based on the decreasing genetic diversity in populations that are farther from Africa.
But others believe that the order of events was a bit more complicated.
“Our previous work found that multiple dispersals, with the first one being older than the 50,000 to 70,000 [years-ago] migration, are most compatible with the pattern of both cranial and genetic variation observed among people today,” said Katerina Harvati, director of paleoanthropology at the University of Tubingen, Germany, by email.
Harvati, who wasn’t involved in the research, said she would be cautious in definitively assigning the finger fossil a Homo sapiens identity due to the fact that its shape overlaps with other hominin species. But the fossil does fit the larger pattern of discoveries made in the region. Skulls belonging to Homo sapiens found in Qafzeh and Skhul in Israel have been dated back to 100,000 years and 120,000 years respectively, and the discovery of a human jawbone from Misliya Cave was dated to around 177,000 years earlier in 2018.
All of these fossils suggest humans left Africa much earlier than 60,000 years ago. But the new finger bone suggests some populations continued moving, beyond the Levant and into the Arabian Peninsula.
[...] The finger gestures to another question as well: What happened to the population that made it all the way to Arabia? Were they forced to move forward, or retreat when the environment became inhospitable once more within centuries after they arrived?
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 11 2018, @06:41AM (5 children)
Of course, still using them, and they say nothing about migration out of Africa, but they might say something about Greek migration to Alexandria! So, perhaps, we could have had a nice aristarchus submission, instead?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chromas on Wednesday April 11 2018, @07:11AM (3 children)
I, for one, appreciate your dedication to submitting. If you could take a break from "alt right, alt right, alt right!" (—Aristarchus McConaughey) and maybe find something tech/nerd/adult/science-related, it's a lot more likely your subs'd be posted.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 11 2018, @07:28AM (2 children)
I appreciate your opinion, chromas! But I do not share your conclusion. I think that anything I submit will not be rejected, purely on the basis of being an "aristarchus submission". The eds have taken a stance against me, ever since my first sub about the Charlottesville, when TMB and cmn32480 objected vociferously that I was trying to paint them with a broad brush of, well, being rightist, and thus alt-rightist, and so, Nazis and such. If the Foo Shits, I always say.
So, yes, I could submit news of general interest, technology and what not. But until the eds relent on their embargo on news on the alt-right, I will submit nothing but. And is not hard, but getting harder, since the alt-right seems to have never been anything but a bunch of Republicans without the self-restraint to not say politically incorrect, and otherwise just incorrect, things, so they are now being exposed as the "chuckle-heads" they always were. But, still, SoylentNews is suppressing news about this? Is it because only I am submitting it, and no one is interested? That is possible. But it is also, and more, possible that the Eds have a distinct Right Wing Nut Job bias. Maybe. Could be. Prove me wrong.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Bot on Wednesday April 11 2018, @08:05AM (1 child)
>I think that anything I submit will not be rejected
ah, practicing auto censorship? very stoic.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Informative) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 11 2018, @08:22AM
You seem to have clipped something. I will continue to submit. If for no other reason to put a bug up JR's posterior. And to point out the hypocrisy of TMB's "all free speech, all the time" shtick. Right, you right-wing ignoramous. Not surprising, for a Buzzard, actually.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 11 2018, @08:50AM
Hmm, offtopic mod. Aristarchus does not have fingers? The fisting bastard! Keep him away from the subs queue!!!