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97-437: In paleoanthropology , the recent African origin of modern humans or the " Out of Africa " theory ( OOA ) is the mainstream academic model of the geographic origin and early migration of anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ). It follows the early expansions of hominins out of Africa , accomplished by Homo erectus and then Homo neanderthalensis . The model proposes a " single origin " of Homo sapiens in

194-623: A bottleneck (i.e. a founder effect ). The group that crossed the Red Sea travelled along the coastal route around Arabia and Persia until reaching India. Haplogroup M is found in high frequencies along the southern coastal regions of Pakistan and India and it has the greatest diversity in India, indicating that it is here where the mutation may have occurred. Sixty percent of the Indian population belong to Haplogroup M . The indigenous people of

291-786: A "rapid single dispersal of all non-Africans less than 55,000 years ago". By 45,000 years ago, modern humans are known to have reached northwestern Europe. The first lineage to branch off from Mitochondrial Eve was L0 . This haplogroup is found in high proportions among the San of Southern Africa and the Sandawe of East Africa. It is also found among the Mbuti people. These groups branched off early in human history and have remained relatively genetically isolated since then. Haplogroups L1 , L2 , and L3 are descendants of L1–L6, and are largely confined to Africa. The macro haplogroups M and N , which are

388-744: A Southern Route dispersal of modern humans as the Bab-el-Mandeb strait experienced a climate more conductive to human migration than the northern landbridge to the Levant during the major human dispersal out of Africa. A 2023 study proposed that Eurasians and Africans genetically diverged ~100,000 years ago. Main Eurasians then lived in the Saudi Peninsula, genetically isolated from at least 85 kya, before expanding north 54 kya. For reference, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals diverged ~500 kya. It

485-961: A basal African strain of JCV has become extinct or that the original infection with JCV post-dates the migration from Africa. Evidence for archaic human species (descended from Homo heidelbergensis ) having interbred with modern humans outside of Africa, was discovered in the 2010s. This concerns primarily Neanderthal admixture in all modern populations except for Sub-Saharan Africans but evidence has also been presented for Denisova hominin admixture in Australasia (i.e. in Melanesians , Aboriginal Australians and some Negritos ). The rate of Neanderthal admixture to European and Asian populations as of 2017 has been estimated at between about 2–3%. Archaic admixture in some Sub-Saharan African populations hunter-gatherer groups ( Biaka Pygmies and San ), derived from archaic hominins that broke away from

582-549: A distinct southern Himalayan route, and expanded through multiple migration waves southwards and northwards respectively. Genetic studies concluded that Native Americans descended from a single founding population that initially split from a Basal-East Asian source population in Mainland Southeast Asia around 36,000 years ago, at the same time at which the proper Jōmon people split from Basal-East Asians, either together with Ancestral Native Americans or during

679-594: A little more than two years, in the winter of 1929, Pei Wenzhong , then the field director at Zhoukoudian, unearthed the first complete calvaria of Peking Man . Twenty-seven years after Schlosser’s initial description, the antiquity of early humans in East Asia was no longer a speculation, but a reality. Excavations continued at the site and remained fruitful until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. The decade-long research yielded

776-419: A mixture of modern and archaic features at around 315,000 years old. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the picture of "recent single-origin" migrations has become significantly more complex, due to the discovery of modern-archaic admixture and the increasing evidence that the "recent out-of-Africa" migration took place in waves over a long time. As of 2010, there were two main accepted dispersal routes for

873-649: A new species, Ardipithecus ramidus , based on fossils from Ethiopia. In 1999, two new species were announced. Berhane Asfaw and Tim D. White named Australopithecus garhi based on specimens discovered in Ethiopia's Awash valley . Meave Leakey announced a new species, Kenyanthropus platyops , based on the cranium KNM-WT 40000 from Lake Turkana. In the 21st century, numerous fossils have been found that add to current knowledge of existing species. For example, in 2001, Zeresenay Alemseged discovered an Australopithecus afarensis child fossil, called Selam , from

970-642: A new species, Australopithecus sediba , based on fossils they had discovered in Malapa cave in South Africa. In 2015, a team also led by Lee Berger announced another species, Homo naledi , based on fossils representing 15 individuals from the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa. New species have also been found in eastern Africa. In 2000, Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford described

1067-415: A pre-Toba dispersal but the source of the tools is disputed. An indication for post-Toba is haplo-group L3, that originated before the dispersal of humans out of Africa and can be dated to 60,000–70,000 years ago, "suggesting that humanity left Africa a few thousand years after Toba". Some research showing slower than expected genetic mutations in human DNA was published in 2012, indicating a revised dating for

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1164-692: A proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation seeking financial support for systematic excavation at Zhoukoudian and the establishment of an institute for the study of human biology in China. The Zhoukoudian Project came into existence in the spring of 1927, and two years later, the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey of China was formally established. Being the first institution of its kind,

1261-467: A resurgence of the "long-neglected" North African route. This new understanding of the role of the Arabian dispersal began to change following results from archaeological and genetic studies stressing the importance of southern Arabia as a corridor for human expansions out of Africa. In Oman , a site was discovered by Bien Joven in 2011 containing more than 100 surface scatters of stone tools belonging to

1358-765: A separate expansion wave. They also show that the basal northern and southern Native American branches, to which all other Indigenous peoples belong, diverged around 16,000 years ago. An indigenous American sample from 16,000BC in Idaho , which is craniometrically similar to modern Native Americans as well as Paleosiberias , was found to have largely East-Eurasian ancestry and showed high affinity with contemporary East Asians, as well as Jōmon period samples of Japan, confirming that Ancestral Native Americans split from an East-Eurasian source population in Eastern Siberia. According to Macaulay et al. (2005) , an early offshoot from

1455-677: A similar severe drought affected the Southwestern US from the year 2000 . Benjamin Cook suggested that the definition be a drought which is exceptionally severe compared to the weather during the previous 2,000 years. This was still quite imprecise and so research has suggested quantitative measures based on a Standard Precipitation Index. Past megadroughts in North America have been associated with persistent multiyear La Niña conditions (cooler than normal water temperatures in

1552-467: A single human tooth from Beijing . Although Schlosser (1903) was very cautious, identifying the tooth only as "? Anthropoide g. et sp. indet ?," he was hopeful that future work would discover a new anthropoid in China. Eleven years later, the Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson was sent to China as a mining advisor and soon developed an interest in "dragon bones". It was he who, in 1918, discovered

1649-408: A sister lineage of East Asians with or without a minor basal OoA or xOoA contribution. A Holocene hunter-gatherer sample (Leang_Panninge) from South Sulawesi was found to be genetically in between East-Eurasians and Australo-Papuans. The sample could be modeled as ~50% Papuan-related and ~50% Basal-East Asian-related (Andamanese Onge or Tianyuan). The authors concluded that Basal-East Asian ancestry

1746-661: A thing of the past" (1977: 139). The first paleoanthropological find made in Africa was the 1921 discovery of the Kabwe 1 skull at Kabwe (Broken Hill) , Zambia. Initially, this specimen was named Homo rhodesiensis ; however, today it is considered part of the species Homo heidelbergensis . In 1924 in a limestone quarry at Taung , Professor Raymond Dart discovered a remarkably well-preserved juvenile specimen (face and brain endocast), which he named Australopithecus africanus ( Australopithecus meaning "Southern Ape"). Although

1843-441: A unique species. Although most hominin fossils from Africa have been found in eastern and southern Africa, there are a few exceptions. One is Sahelanthropus tchadensis , discovered in the central African country of Chad in 2002. This find is important because it widens the assumed geographic range of early hominins. Megadrought A megadrought is an exceptionally severe drought , lasting for many years and covering

1940-710: A view of "recent origin" combined with archaic admixture . Stringer (2014) distinguishes the original or "classic" Multiregional model as having existed from 1984 (its formulation) until 2003, to a "weak" post-2003 variant that has "shifted close to that of the Assimilation Model". In the 1980s, Allan Wilson together with Rebecca L. Cann and Mark Stoneking worked on genetic dating of the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of modern human populations (dubbed " Mitochondrial Eve "). To identify informative genetic markers for tracking human evolutionary history, Wilson concentrated on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which

2037-399: A vital tool of research of the evolutionary kinship lines of related species and genera. The term paleoanthropology derives from Greek palaiós (παλαιός) "old, ancient", ánthrōpos (ἄνθρωπος) "man, human" and the suffix -logía (-λογία) "study of". Hominoids are a primate superfamily, the hominid family is currently considered to comprise both the great ape lineages and human lineages within

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2134-523: A wealth of faunal and lithic materials, as well as hominin fossils. These included 5 more complete calvaria, 9 large cranial fragments, 6 facial fragments, 14 partial mandibles, 147 isolated teeth, and 11 postcranial elements—estimated to represent as least 40 individuals. Evidence of fire, marked by ash lenses and burned bones and stones, were apparently also present, although recent studies have challenged this view. Franz Weidenreich came to Beijing soon after Black’s untimely death in 1934, and took charge of

2231-529: A wide area. There is no exact definition of a megadrought. The term was first used by Connie Woodhouse and Jonathan Overpeck in their 1998 paper, 2000 Years of Drought Variability in the Central United States . In this, it referred to two periods of severe drought in the US – one at the end of the 13th century and the other in the middle of the 16th century. The term was then popularised as

2328-467: Is about 20 kilometres (12 mi) wide, but 50,000 years ago sea levels were 70 m (230 ft) lower (owing to glaciation) and the water channel was much narrower. Though the straits were never completely closed, they were narrow enough to have enabled crossing using simple rafts, and there may have been islands in between. Shell middens 125,000 years old have been found in Eritrea , indicating that

2425-563: Is also supported by Rasmussen et al. (2011). Fossils from Lake Mungo , Australia, have been dated to about 42,000 years ago. Other fossils from a site called Madjedbebe have been dated to at least 65,000 years ago, though some researchers doubt this early estimate and date the Madjedbebe fossils at about 50,000 years ago at the oldest. Phylogenetic data suggests that an early Eastern Eurasian (Eastern non-African) meta-population trifurcated somewhere in eastern South Asia , and gave rise to

2522-451: Is an archaism. Endicott et al. (2003) suggest convergent evolution . A 2014 study by Gurdasani et al. indicates that the higher genetic diversity in Africa was further increased in some regions by relatively recent Eurasian migrations affecting parts of Africa. Another promising route towards reconstructing human genetic genealogy is via the JC virus (JCV), a type of human polyomavirus which

2619-475: Is carried by 70–90 percent of humans and which is usually transmitted vertically, from parents to offspring, suggesting codivergence with human populations. For this reason, JCV has been used as a genetic marker for human evolution and migration. This method does not appear to be reliable for the migration out of Africa; in contrast to human genetics, JCV strains associated with African populations are not basal. From this Shackelton et al. (2006) conclude that either

2716-407: Is largely a subset of that among Africans, supporting the out of Africa model. A large study by Coop et al . (2009) found evidence for natural selection in autosomal DNA outside of Africa. The study distinguishes non-African sweeps (notably KITLG variants associated with skin color ), West-Eurasian sweeps ( SLC24A5 ) and East-Asian sweeps ( MC1R , relevant to skin color). Based on this evidence,

2813-400: Is maternally inherited. This DNA material mutates quickly, making it easy to plot changes over relatively short times. With his discovery that human mtDNA is genetically much less diverse than chimpanzee mtDNA, Wilson concluded that modern human populations had diverged recently from a single population while older human species such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus had become extinct. With

2910-537: Is related "to many present-day Asians and Native Americans ". Tianyuan is similar in morphology to Liujiang man, and some Jōmon period modern humans found in Japan, as well as modern East and Southeast Asians. A 2021 study about the population history of Eastern Eurasia, concluded that distinctive Basal-East Asian (East-Eurasian) ancestry originated in Mainland Southeast Asia at ~50,000BC from

3007-546: Is specific to African populations, it is inferred to have been derived from interbreeding between African modern and archaic humans. A study published in 2020 found that the Yoruba and Mende populations of West Africa derive between 2% and 19% of their genome from an as-yet unidentified archaic hominin population that likely diverged before the split of modern humans and the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans. In addition to genetic analysis, Petraglia et al. also examines

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3104-588: Is thought that Australia was inhabited around 65,000–50,000 years ago. As of 2017, the earliest evidence of humans in Australia is at least 65,000 years old, while McChesney stated that ...genetic evidence suggests that a small band with the marker M168 migrated out of Africa along the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula and India, through Indonesia, and reached Australia very early, between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago. This very early migration into Australia

3201-821: The African continent around the same time period. Another study finds a plausible placement in "the north-western quadrant of the African continent" for the emergence of the A1b haplogroup. The 2013 report of haplogroup A00 found among the Mbo people of western present-day Cameroon is also compatible with this picture. Paleoanthropology The field draws from and combines primatology , paleontology , biological anthropology , and cultural anthropology . As technologies and methods advance, genetics plays an ever-increasing role, in particular to examine and compare DNA structure as

3298-522: The Andaman Islands also belong to the M lineage. The Andamanese are thought to be offshoots of some of the earliest inhabitants in Asia because of their long isolation from the mainland. They are evidence of the coastal route of early settlers that extends from India to Thailand and Indonesia all the way to eastern New Guinea . Since M is found in high frequencies in highlanders from New Guinea and

3395-530: The M and N haplogroup lineages, are found in very low frequencies in Africa (although haplogroup M1 populations are very ancient and diversified in North and North-east Africa ) and appear to be more recent arrivals. A possible explanation is that these mutations occurred in East Africa shortly before the exodus and became the dominant haplogroups thereafter by means of the founder effect . Alternatively,

3492-432: The hominoid superfamily. The " Homininae " comprise both the human lineages and the African ape lineages. The term "African apes" refers only to chimpanzees and gorillas . The terminology of the immediate biological family is currently in flux. The term "hominin" refers to any genus in the human tribe (Hominini), of which Homo sapiens (modern humans) is the only living specimen. In 1758 Carl Linnaeus introduced

3589-628: The taxonomic sense, precluding parallel evolution in other regions of traits considered anatomically modern , but not precluding multiple admixture between H. sapiens and archaic humans in Europe and Asia. H. sapiens most likely developed in the Horn of Africa between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago, although an alternative hypothesis argues that diverse morphological features of H. sapiens appeared locally in different parts of Africa and converged due to gene flow between different populations within

3686-409: The 1930s, paleontologist Robert Broom discovered and described a new species at Kromdraai , South Africa. Although similar in some ways to Dart's Australopithecus africanus , Broom's specimen had much larger cheek teeth. Because of this difference, Broom named his specimen Paranthropus robustus , using a new genus name. In doing so, he established the practice of grouping gracile australopiths in

3783-419: The 19th century with the discovery of " Neanderthal man" (the eponymous skeleton was found in 1856, but there had been finds elsewhere since 1830), and with evidence of so-called cave men . The idea that humans are similar to certain great apes had been obvious to people for some time, but the idea of the biological evolution of species in general was not legitimized until after Charles Darwin published On

3880-474: The 20th century. The "Recent African origin" of modern humans means "single origin" (monogenism) and has been used in various contexts as an antonym to polygenism. The debate in anthropology had swung in favour of monogenism by the mid-20th century. Isolated proponents of polygenism held forth in the mid-20th century, such as Carleton Coon , who thought as late as 1962 that H. sapiens arose five times from H. erectus in five places. The historical alternative to

3977-604: The Altai Neanderthals. They found that "the ancestors of Neanderthals from the Altai Mountains and early modern humans met and interbred, possibly in the Near East, many thousands of years earlier than previously thought". According to co-author Ilan Gronau, "This actually complements archaeological evidence of the presence of early modern humans out of Africa around and before 100,000 years ago by providing

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4074-540: The Andamanese and New Guineans have dark skin and Afro-textured hair , some scientists think they are all part of the same wave of migrants who departed across the Red Sea ~60,000 years ago in the Great Coastal Migration . The proportion of haplogroup M increases eastwards from Arabia to India; in eastern India, M outnumbers N by a ratio of 3:1. Crossing into Southeast Asia, haplogroup N (mostly in

4171-399: The Arabian Peninsula about 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. There is evidence that modern humans had reached China around 80,000 years ago. Practically all of these early waves seem to have gone extinct or retreated back, and present-day humans outside Africa descend mainly from a single expansion about 70,000–50,000 years ago, via the so-called " Southern Route ". These humans spread rapidly along

4268-616: The Australo-Papuans, the Ancient Ancestral South Indians (AASI), as well as East/Southeast Asians, although Papuans may have also received some gene flow from an earlier group (xOoA), around 2%, next to additional archaic admixture in the Sahul region. According to one study, Papuans could have either formed from a mixture between an East Eurasian lineage and lineage basal to West and East Asians, or as

4365-607: The Cenozoic Laboratory opened up new avenues for the study of paleogeology and paleontology in China. The Laboratory was the precursor of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Science, which took its modern form after 1949. The first of the major project finds are attributed to the young Swedish paleontologist, Anders Birger Bohlin , then serving as

4462-490: The Origin of Species in 1859. Though Darwin's first book on evolution did not address the specific question of human evolution—"light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history," was all Darwin wrote on the subject—the implications of evolutionary theory were clear to contemporary readers. Debates between Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen focused on the idea of human evolution. Huxley convincingly illustrated many of

4559-527: The Red Sea. The group that crossed the Red Sea travelled along the coastal route around Arabia and the Persian Plateau to India, which appears to have been the first major settling point. Wells (2003) argued for the route along the southern coastline of Asia, across about 250 kilometres (155 mi), reaching Australia by around 50,000 years ago. Today at the Bab-el-Mandeb straits , the Red Sea

4656-535: The Taung child was a bipedal human ancestor, a transitional form between ape and human. However, Dart's conclusions were largely ignored for decades, as the prevailing view of the time was that a large brain evolved before bipedality. It took the discovery of additional australopith fossils in Africa that resembled his specimen, and the rejection of the Piltdown Man hoax , for Dart's claims to be taken seriously. In

4753-599: The Y-MRCA living in the general region of "Central-Northwest Africa". A Stanford University School of Medicine study was done by comparing Y-chromosome sequences and mtDNA in 69 men from different geographic regions and constructing a family tree. It was found that the Y-MRCA lived between 120,000 and 156,000, and the Mitochondrial Eve lived between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago, which not only predates some proposed waves of migration, but also meant that both lived in

4850-428: The advent of archaeogenetics in the 1990s, the dating of mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal haplogroups became possible with some confidence. By 1999, estimates ranged around 150,000 years for the mt-MRCA and 60,000 to 70,000 years for the migration out of Africa. From 2000 to 2003, there was controversy about the mitochondrial DNA of " Mungo Man 3 " (LM3) and its possible bearing on the multiregional hypothesis . LM3

4947-588: The area published in 2016, showed it to be akin to modern Aboriginal Australian sequences, inconsistent with the results of the earlier study. The Y chromosome , which is paternally inherited, does not go through much recombination and thus stays largely the same after inheritance. Similar to Mitochondrial Eve, this could be studied to track the male most recent common ancestor (" Y-chromosomal Adam " or Y-MRCA). The most basal lineages have been detected in West , Northwest and Central Africa , suggesting plausibility for

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5044-558: The behaviour of African apes , one of which was displayed at the London Zoo . The anatomist Thomas Huxley had also supported the hypothesis and suggested that African apes have a close evolutionary relationship with humans. These views were opposed by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel , who was a proponent of the Out of Asia theory . Haeckel argued that humans were more closely related to

5141-455: The brain was small (410 cm ), its shape was rounded, unlike the brain shape of chimpanzees and gorillas, and more like the shape seen in modern humans. In addition, the specimen exhibited short canine teeth , and the anterior placement of the foramen magnum was more like the placement seen in modern humans than the placement seen in chimpanzees and gorillas, suggesting that this species was bipedal . All of these traits convinced Dart that

5238-443: The coast of Asia and reached Australia by around 65,000–50,000 years ago, (though some researchers question the earlier Australian dates and place the arrival of humans there at 50,000 years ago at earliest, while others have suggested that these first settlers of Australia may represent an older wave before the more significant out of Africa migration and thus not necessarily be ancestral to the region's later inhabitants) while Europe

5335-603: The colder regions of ice-age Europe. Hua Liu et al. analyzed autosomal microsatellite markers dating to about 56,000 years ago. They interpret the paleontological fossil as an isolated early offshoot that retracted back to Africa. The discovery of stone tools in the United Arab Emirates in 2011 at the Faya-1 site in Mleiha , Sharjah , indicated the presence of modern humans at least 125,000 years ago, leading to

5432-473: The dating was questioned by Groucutt et al. (2015) . The lack of fossils and stone tool industries that can be safely associated with modern humans in the Levant has been taken to suggest that modern humans were outcompeted by Neanderthals until around 55,000 years ago, who would have placed a barrier on modern human dispersal out of Africa through the Northern Route. Climate reconstructions also support

5529-529: The diet of early humans included seafood obtained by beachcombing . The dating of the Southern Dispersal is a matter of dispute. It may have happened either pre- or post-Toba, a catastrophic volcanic eruption that took place between 69,000 and 77,000 years ago at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. Stone tools discovered below the layers of ash deposited in India may point to

5626-536: The dispersal through the Levant approximately 45,000 years ago. This hypothesis attempts to explain why haplogroup N is predominant in Europe and why haplogroup M is absent in Europe. Evidence of the coastal migration is thought to have been destroyed by the rise in sea levels during the Holocene epoch. Alternatively, a small European founder population that had expressed haplogroup M and N at first, could have lost haplogroup M through random genetic drift resulting from

5723-654: The famous Laetoli footprints in Tanzania, which demonstrated the antiquity of bipedality in the human lineage. In 1985, Richard Leakey and Alan Walker discovered a specimen they called the Black Skull , found near Lake Turkana. This specimen was assigned to another species, Paranthropus aethiopicus . In 1994, a team led by Meave Leakey announced a new species, Australopithecus anamensis , based on specimens found near Lake Turkana. Numerous other researchers have made important discoveries in eastern Africa. Possibly

5820-415: The field advisor at Zhoukoudian . He recovered a left lower molar that Black (1927) identified as unmistakably human (it compared favorably to the previous find made by Zdansky), and subsequently coined it Sinanthropus pekinensis . The news was at first met with skepticism, and many scholars had reservations that a single tooth was sufficient to justify the naming of a new type of early hominin. Yet within

5917-475: The first genetic evidence of such populations." Similar genetic admixture events have been noted in other regions as well. By some 50–70,000 years ago, a subset of the bearers of mitochondrial haplogroup L3 migrated from East Africa into the Near East . It has been estimated that from a population of 2,000 to 5,000 individuals in Africa, only a small group, possibly as few as 150 to 1,000 people, crossed

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6014-488: The form of derivatives of its R subclade) reappears as the predominant lineage. M is predominant in East Asia, but amongst Indigenous Australians , N is the more common lineage. This haphazard distribution of Haplogroup N from Europe to Australia can be explained by founder effects and population bottlenecks . A 2002 study of African, European, and Asian populations, found greater genetic diversity among Africans than among Eurasians, and that genetic diversity among Eurasians

6111-577: The fossil KNM-ER 1470 near Lake Turkana in Kenya. KNM-ER 1470 has been interpreted as either a distinct species, Homo rudolfensis , or alternatively as evidence of sexual dimorphism in Homo habilis . In 1967, Richard Leakey reported the earliest definitive examples of anatomically modern Homo sapiens from the site of Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, known as the Omo remains . In the late 1970s, Mary Leakey excavated

6208-489: The fossil hominin teeth delighted the scientific community in Beijing, and plans for developing a larger, more systematic project at Zhoukoudian were soon formulated. At the epicenter of excitement was Davidson Black , a Canadian-born anatomist working at Peking Union Medical College . Black shared Andersson’s interest, as well as his view that central Asia was a promising home for early humankind. In late 1926, Black submitted

6305-450: The genus Australopithecus and robust australopiths in the genus Paranthropus . During the 1960s, the robust variety was commonly moved into Australopithecus . A more recent consensus has been to return to the original classification of Paranthropus as a separate genus. The second half of the twentieth century saw a significant increase in the number of paleoanthropological finds made in Africa. Many of these finds were associated with

6402-476: The idea that human beings could have evolved their apparently boundless mental capacities and moral sensibilities through natural selection . Prior to the general acceptance of Africa as the root of genus Homo , 19th-century naturalists sought the origin of humans in Asia. So-called "dragon bones" (fossil bones and teeth) from Chinese apothecary shops were known, but it was not until the early 20th century that German paleontologist, Max Schlosser , first described

6499-884: The late Nubian Complex, known previously only from archaeological excavations in the Sudan . Two optically stimulated luminescence age estimates placed the Arabian Nubian Complex at approximately 106,000 years old. This provides evidence for a distinct Stone Age technocomplex in southern Arabia, around the earlier part of the Marine Isotope Stage 5 . According to Kuhlwilm and his co-authors, Neanderthals contributed genetically to modern humans then living outside of Africa around 100,000 years ago: humans which had already split off from other modern humans around 200,000 years ago, and this early wave of modern humans outside Africa also contributed genetically to

6596-531: The lineages of the rest of the world outside Africa, descend from L3. L3 is about 70,000 years old, while haplogroups M and N are about 65–55,000 years old. The relationship between such gene trees and demographic history is still debated when applied to dispersals. Of all the lineages present in Africa, the female descendants of only one lineage, mtDNA haplogroup L3 , are found outside Africa. If there had been several migrations, one would expect descendants of more than one lineage to be found. L3's female descendants,

6693-582: The migration of anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) out of Africa after their emergence at c. 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, in contrast to " Out of Africa I ", which refers to the migration of archaic humans from Africa to Eurasia from before 1.8 and up to 0.5 million years ago. Omo-Kibish I (Omo I) from southern Ethiopia is the oldest anatomically modern Homo sapiens skeleton currently known (around 233,000 years old). There are even older Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco which exhibit

6790-637: The migration to between 90,000 and 130,000 years ago. Some more recent research suggests a migration out-of-Africa of around 50,000-65,000 years ago of the ancestors of modern non-African populations, similar to most previous estimates. Following the fossils dating 80,000 to 120,000 years ago from Qafzeh and Es-Skhul Caves in Israel there are no H. sapiens fossils in the Levant until the Manot 1 fossil from Manot Cave in Israel, dated to 54,700 years ago, though

6887-494: The modern human lineage around 700,000 years ago, was discovered in 2011. The rate of admixture was estimated at 2%. Admixture from archaic hominins of still earlier divergence times, estimated at 1.2 to 1.3 million years ago, was found in Pygmies , Hadza and five Sandawe in 2012. From an analysis of Mucin 7 , a highly divergent haplotype that has an estimated coalescence time with other variants around 4.5 million years BP and

6984-626: The most famous is the Lucy skeleton , discovered in 1973 by Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb in Ethiopia's Afar Triangle at the site of Hadar . On the basis of this skeleton and subsequent discoveries, the researchers came up with a new species, Australopithecus afarensis . In 1975, Colin Groves and Vratislav Mazák announced a new species of human they called Homo ergaster . Homo ergaster specimens have been found at numerous sites in eastern and southern Africa. In 1994, Tim D. White announced

7081-484: The most widely accepted range of dates with 67,000 BP as a minimum, but do not rule out dates as old as 159,000 BP. Liu, Martinón-Torres et al. (2015) claim that modern human teeth have been found in China dating to at least 80,000 years ago. Tianyuan man from China has a probable date range between 38,000 and 42,000 years ago, while Liujiang man from the same region has a probable date range between 67,000 and 159,000 years ago. According to 2013 DNA tests, Tianyuan man

7178-576: The mutations may have arisen shortly afterwards. Results from mtDNA collected from aboriginal Malaysians called Orang Asli indicate that the haplogroups M and N share characteristics with original African groups from approximately 85,000 years ago, and share characteristics with sub-haplogroups found in coastal south-east Asian regions, such as Australasia, the Indian subcontinent and throughout continental Asia, which had dispersed and separated from their African progenitor approximately 65,000 years ago. This southern coastal dispersal would have occurred before

7275-454: The name Homo sapiens as a species name in the 10th edition of his work Systema Naturae although without a scientific description of the species-specific characteristics. Since the great apes were considered the closest relatives of human beings, based on morphological similarity, in the 19th century, it was speculated that the closest living relatives to humans were chimpanzees (genus Pan ) and gorilla (genus Gorilla ), and based on

7372-752: The natural range of these creatures, it was surmised that humans shared a common ancestor with African apes and that fossils of these ancestors would ultimately be found in Africa. The science arguably began in the late 19th century when important discoveries occurred that led to the study of human evolution . The discovery of the Neanderthal in Germany, Thomas Huxley 's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature , and Charles Darwin 's The Descent of Man were both important to early paleoanthropological research. The modern field of paleoanthropology began in

7469-706: The out-of-Africa migration of early anatomically modern humans, the "Northern Route" (via Nile Valley and Sinai) and the "Southern Route" via the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. Beginning 135,000 years ago, tropical Africa experienced megadroughts which drove humans from the land and towards the sea shores, and forced them to cross over to other continents. Fossils of early Homo sapiens were found in Qafzeh and Es-Skhul Caves in Israel and have been dated to 80,000 to 120,000 years ago. These humans seem to have either become extinct or retreated back to Africa 70,000 to 80,000 years ago, possibly replaced by southbound Neanderthals escaping

7566-491: The paleoanthropological spotlight shifted westward to East Africa. Although China re-opened its doors to the West in the late 1970s, national policy calling for self-reliance, coupled with a widened language barrier, thwarted all the possibilities of renewed scientific relationships. Indeed, Harvard anthropologist K. C. Chang noted, "international collaboration (in developing nations very often a disguise for Western domination) became

7663-402: The primates of South-east Asia and rejected Darwin's African hypothesis. In The Descent of Man , Darwin speculated that humans had descended from apes, which still had small brains but walked upright, freeing their hands for uses which favoured intelligence; he thought such apes were African: In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of

7760-549: The recent origin model is the multiregional origin of modern humans , initially proposed by Milford Wolpoff in the 1980s. This view proposes that the derivation of anatomically modern human populations from H. erectus at the beginning of the Pleistocene 1.8 million years BP, has taken place within a continuous world population. The hypothesis necessarily rejects the assumption of an infertility barrier between ancient Eurasian and African populations of Homo . The hypothesis

7857-405: The same period. The "recent African origin" model proposes that all modern non-African populations are substantially descended from populations of H. sapiens that left Africa after that time. There were at least several "out-of-Africa" dispersals of modern humans, possibly beginning as early as 270,000 years ago, including 215,000 years ago to at least Greece, and certainly via northern Africa and

7954-490: The same region. It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee ; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this subject, for an ape nearly as large as a man, namely the Dryopithecus of Lartet, which

8051-423: The similarities and differences between humans and apes in his 1863 book Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature . By the time Darwin published his own book on the subject, Descent of Man , it was already a well-known interpretation of his theory—and the interpretation which made the theory highly controversial. Even many of Darwin's original supporters (such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Lyell ) balked at

8148-459: The site of Dikika in the Afar region of Ethiopia. This find is particularly important because the fossil included a preserved hyoid bone , something rarely found in other paleoanthropological fossils but important for understanding the evolution of speech capacities. Two new species from southern Africa have been discovered and described in recent years. In 2008, a team led by Lee Berger announced

8245-698: The sites around Zhoukoudian , a village about 50 kilometers southwest of Beijing. However, because of the sparse nature of the initial finds, the site was abandoned. Work did not resume until 1921, when the Austrian paleontologist, Otto Zdansky , fresh with his doctoral degree from Vienna, came to Beijing to work for Andersson. Zdansky conducted short-term excavations at Locality 1 in 1921 and 1923, and recovered only two teeth of significance (one premolar and one molar) that he subsequently described, cautiously, as "? Homo sp. " (Zdansky, 1927). With that done, Zdansky returned to Austria and suspended all fieldwork. News of

8342-501: The small stone tools ( microlithic materials) from the Indian subcontinent and explains the expansion of population based on the reconstruction of paleoenvironment. He proposed that the stone tools could be dated to 35 ka in South Asia, and the new technology might be influenced by environmental change and population pressure. The cladistic relationship of humans with the African apes was suggested by Charles Darwin after studying

8439-589: The southern dispersal with haplogroup N followed the Nile from East Africa, heading northwards and crossing into Asia through the Sinai . This group then branched, some moving into Europe and others heading east into Asia. This hypothesis is supported by the relatively late date of the arrival of modern humans in Europe as well as by archaeological and DNA evidence. Based on an analysis of 55 human mitochondrial genomes (mtDNAs) of hunter-gatherers, Posth et al. (2016) argue for

8536-406: The species Orrorin tugenensis , based on fossils they found in Kenya. In 2004, Yohannes Haile-Selassie announced that some specimens previously labeled as Ardipithecus ramidus made up a different species, Ardipithecus kadabba . In 2015, Haile-Selassie announced another new species, Australopithecus deyiremeda , though some scholars are skeptical that the associated fossils truly represent

8633-487: The study concluded that human populations encountered novel selective pressures as they expanded out of Africa. MC1R and its relation to skin color had already been discussed by Harding et al. (2000) , p. 1355. According to this study, Papua New Guineans continued to be exposed to selection for dark skin color so that, although these groups are distinct from Africans in other places, the allele for dark skin color shared by contemporary Africans, Andamanese and New Guineans

8730-649: The study of the hominin specimens. Following the loss of the Peking Man materials in late 1941, scientific endeavors at Zhoukoudian slowed, primarily because of lack of funding. Frantic search for the missing fossils took place, and continued well into the 1950s. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, excavations resumed at Zhoukoudian. But with political instability and social unrest brewing in China, beginning in 1966, and major discoveries at Olduvai Gorge and East Turkana ( Koobi Fora ),

8827-632: The tropical eastern Pacific Ocean ). Megadroughts have historically led to the mass migration of humans away from drought affected lands, resulting in a significant population decline from pre-drought levels. They are suspected of playing a primary role in the collapse of several pre-industrial civilizations , including the Ancestral Puebloans of the North American Southwest, the Khmer Empire of Cambodia,

8924-577: The work of the Leakey family in eastern Africa. In 1959, Mary Leakey 's discovery of the Zinj fossin ( OH 5 ) at Olduvai Gorge , Tanzania, led to the identification of a new species, Paranthropus boisei . In 1960, the Leakeys discovered the fossil OH 7 , also at Olduvai Gorge, and assigned it to a new species, Homo habilis . In 1972, Bernard Ngeneo, a fieldworker working for Richard Leakey , discovered

9021-676: Was closely allied to the anthropomorphous Hylobates , existed in Europe during the Upper Miocene period; and since so remote a period the earth has certainly undergone many great revolutions, and there has been ample time for migration on the largest scale. In 1871, there were hardly any human fossils of ancient hominins available. Almost fifty years later, Darwin's speculation was supported when anthropologists began finding fossils of ancient small-brained hominins in several areas of Africa ( list of hominina fossils ). The hypothesis of recent (as opposed to archaic ) African origin developed in

9118-404: Was controversially debated during the late 1980s and the 1990s. The now-current terminology of "recent-origin" and "Out of Africa" became current in the context of this debate in the 1990s. Originally seen as an antithetical alternative to the recent origin model, the multiregional hypothesis in its original "strong" form is obsolete, while its various modified weaker variants have become variants of

9215-522: Was far more widespread and the peopling of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania was more complex than previously anticipated. In China, the Liujiang man ( Chinese : 柳江人 ) is among the earliest modern humans found in East Asia . The date most commonly attributed to the remains is 67,000 years ago. High rates of variability yielded by various dating techniques carried out by different researchers place

9312-497: Was found to have more than the expected number of sequence differences when compared to modern human DNA ( CRS ). Comparison of the mitochondrial DNA with that of ancient and modern aborigines , led to the conclusion that Mungo Man fell outside the range of genetic variation seen in Aboriginal Australians and was used to support the multiregional origin hypothesis. A reanalysis of LM3 and other ancient specimens from

9409-559: Was populated by an early offshoot which settled the Near East and Europe less than 55,000 years ago. In the 2010s, studies in population genetics uncovered evidence of interbreeding that occurred between H. sapiens and archaic humans in Eurasia, Oceania and Africa, indicating that modern population groups, while mostly derived from early H. sapiens , are to a lesser extent also descended from regional variants of archaic humans. "Recent African origin", or Out of Africa II , refers to

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