'First of our kind' found in Morocco

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News, Paris

7 June 2017

The idea that modern people evolved in a single "cradle of humanity" in East Africa some 200,000 years ago is no longer tenable, new research suggests. 

Fossils of five early humans have been found in North Africa that show Homo sapiens emerged at least 100,000 years earlier than previously recognised. 

It suggests that our species evolved all across the continent, the scientists involved say. 

Their work is published in the journal Nature.

Prof Jean-Jacques Hublin, of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told me that the discovery would "rewrite the textbooks" about our emergence as a species. 

"It is not the story of it happening in a rapid way in a 'Garden of Eden' somewhere in Africa. Our view is that it was a more gradual development and it involved the whole

Prof Hublin was speaking at a news conference at the College de France in Paris, where he proudly showed journalists casts of the fossil remains his team has excavated at a site in Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. The specimens include skulls, teeth, and long bones. 

Earlier finds from the same site in the 1960s had been dated to be 40,000 years old and ascribed to an African form of Neanderthal, a close evolutionary cousin of Homo sapiens. 

But Prof Hublin was always troubled by that initial interpretation, and when he joined the MPI he began reassessing Jebel Irhoud. And more than 10 years later he is now presenting new evidence that tells a very different story. 

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55,000-year-old human skull found in Israel sheds light on migration and sex with Neanderthals

An ancient skull found in a cave in northern Israel has cast light on the migration of modern humans out of Africa and the dawn of humanity’s colonisation of the world.

For most palaeontologists that might be enough for a single fossil, but the braincase has offered much more: a likely location where the first prehistoric trysts resulted in modern humans having sex with their heavy-browed Neanderthal cousins .

Discovered in a cave in western Galilee, the partial skull belonged to an individual, probably a woman, who lived and died in the region about 55,000 years ago, placing modern humans there and then for the first time ever.

Homo sapiens walked out of Africa at least 60,000 years ago, but the harsh climate in parts of Europe at the time hampered their spread across much of the continent until about 45,000 years ago.

The skull reveals that modern humans reached the Levant where the population may have given rise to those who later colonised Europe when the frozen climate abated and the territory became more habitable.

Continued ...

The Curious Case of the London Troglodyte

Homo sapiens. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? After all, recognizing that every human being is a member of the same species—that we’re all fundamentally made of the same stuff—sits at the center of why there’s any such thing as universal human rights. Homo sapiens, from the Latin, “Wise Man.”

The Swede who named us, however, was limited by the popular wisdom of his time. Failing to recognize that albino African children were, in fact, the same species as European children, botanist Carolus Linnaeus tried in 1758 to purchase a teenage girl in London as a scientific specimen. He thought she was a troglodyte.

February, 1758

Winter locked the river in ice. But light bloomed like beads of sweat inside his greenhouse of specimens—here a rare African violet, there a pineapple from Java. Linnaeus liked to walk through his garden at Uppsala before settling in to a day’s work. After all, he’d trained as a botanist.

Continued

The lost cousins of Homo sapiens in Asia and the South Pacific

By Paige Minteer

The evolution of humans is the result of a number of speciation events that have built upon one another to create the modern-day human species: Homo sapiens. Humans are believed to have evolved from a line of ancestors dating millions of years ago and originating in Africa. The subsequent Homo sapien ancestors dispersed across Europe and Asia. Of particular note are the “Homo denisova“, of which fragments were found in Siberia, and Homo floresiensis, of which fragments have been found in Flores, Indonesia. Both of these species are of particular relevance to the Southeast Asian and Pacific Island areas because of their continued presence in the DNA of modern humans living there.

“Homo denisova” is considered to be a bridge species between the Neanderthal ancestors and the Homo sapiens species. They are said to have bred with modern humans, and potentially Neanderthals, producing hybrid people. “Homo denisova” are assumed to have had dark skin, brown eyes and brown hair. The teeth are larger than that of which Neanderthals and modern humans have, but more evidence is needed to further extrapolate the size and looks of this species (Hawks 2013). The only remnants of the “Homo denisova” species that have been found are a small toe bone fragment and two molars. This has been enough, however, to create a basic genomic sequence of the species. From this, genome researchers have traced gene markers to help determine the migration patterns of the species. By analyzing the gene flow of various generations of people in various areas in Eastern Europe, Asia and the South Pacific, researchers have been able to decipher the movement of the “Homo denisova”. The origin of this species, however, is debated. While original estimates of the age of the bones make the species too old to be a shoot-off of the H. heidelbergensis species, some argue that it could be a very early speciation from this original species. Others believe “H. denisova” could bring to light a non-erectus evolutionary line. This differentiated evolutionary line would be a large branch-off compared to the branching depicted in current theories of human evolution.

Continued:  http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/expeditions/2013/06/14/homo-denisova-and-homo-floresiensis-in-asia-and-the-south-pacific/