Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Asian ancestors in human evolution

The paper was written by researchers at Spain's national center for research into human evolution in Burgos and appears in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research deals mainly with pre-modern humans but it does indicate that human evolution for all the time before any single "out of Africa" modern human migration was by gene flow. My guess is that nothing changed when modern humans emerged. The same process just kept right on a-happening.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070807/sc_afp/usscienceorigins

From the article:

"The findings challenge the prevailing "Out of Africa" theory, which holds that anatomically modern man first arose from one point in Africa and fanned out to conquer the globe, and bolsters the notion that Homo sapiens evolved from different populations in different parts of the globe."

"and bolsters the notion that Homo sapiens evolved from different populations"

Presumably that means 'different populations' of Homo sapiens, and not a genetic convergence of earlier species.

The different races have a common ancestor back there somewhere. Yet there are experts who seem to think that evolution had to stop when H. sapiens turned up. I imagine that must make it very difficult to account for those many regional differences in modern humans.

Redewenur wrote:

"Presumably that means 'different populations' of Homo sapiens, and not a genetic convergence of earlier species."

It would be my guess it means the latter. Possibly going back to H. erectus. Different groups of humans have been moving round the earth and interbreeding with each other in historic times and I see no reason why the phenomenon wouldn't go back to to the first expansion of erectus. It would certainly account for all the evidence currently available, including the DNA evidence. It also seems to be the way all other species evolve but many people like to believe we humans are somehow special.