Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum All Humans Descended From Same Group

Rede. From your second link:

"the "out of Africa" dispersal of modern humans may not have been as simple as once thought...This morphological pattern implies that a simple spread of modern humans from Africa is unlikely"

As you note:

"I find conflicting affirmations of the time of the migration out of Africa."

Dates actually range between 200,000 and 40,000 years. To me this is a huge weakness in the single recent out of Africa model. If the model was correct we should have no trouble dating the migration. Perhaps many of us are influenced by the possibility of an ancient Moses.

I went to a lecture by Alan Thorne in Auckland in 2001. What he said then coincided with conclusions I had come to through transfering information about cattle breeding to human evolution. I agree with him that a date for Mungo man as recent as 40,000 years is irrelevant. It's still older than the more Homo erectus-looking Kow swamp fossils. Modern Aborigines appear to be a hybrid with neither extreme being still present. This is exactly what we would expect.

Regarding Mike's list. Leaving out Paranthropus, the specialised H. floresiensis and early East Asian fossils you get this order of evolution:

Australopithecus afarensis
Australopithecus africanus
Homo habilis
Homo ergaster
Homo erectus
Cro-Magnon man
Neanderthal man
Peking Man China.

H. ergaster and H. erectus are almost certainly just opposite ends of a cline that stretched from Southeast Asia, through China and the Middle East into Africa. Ergaster in Africa, erectus in SE Asia with other regions somewhere between. Subspecies at most. Humans have been moving back and forth through the world since they first evolved. This accounts for the regular replacement of mtDNA and Y-chromosome lines. These lines are much younger in humans than they are in most other mammals. As you say, Cro-Magnons may have "looked fairly identical to modern humans" but they certainly didn't look like modern Europeans. Modern Europeans have regained some Neanderthal traits. I wonder how they did that?