Arthur Kemp’s Blog

Chinese scientists have renewed their ongoing attack on the ‘Out of Africa’ theory of the origin of modern humans with the announcement of the discovery of a 110,000-year-old putative Homo sapiens jawbone from a cave in southern China’s Guangxi province.

The date of the early human fossil is one of the most direct challenges to the out of Africa theory yet made. According to that theory, homo sapiens ancestors only reached east Asia 30,000 years ago (see graphic below, published in the September 2009 edition of National Geographic magazine).

The 110,000 year-old jawbone obviously flies directly in the face of the ‘out-of-Africa’ timeline and provides support for the multi-regional theory of the origin of homo sapiens.

The discovery was formally announced in November’s Chinese Science Bulletin by Jin Changzhu and his colleagues of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing.

The Institute of Earth Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Minnesota State University jointly tested the isotopic element detection on the fossil.

Wu Xinzhi, an anthropologist of Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, “The bone shows that the evolution from ancient man to modern man occurred in East Asia, at least in the area of modern Chongzuo city. It indicates that the process of the evolution to modern man took place in various regions around the world.”

“[This paper] acts to reject the theory that modern humans are of uniquely African origin and supports the notion that emerging African populations mixed with natives they encountered,” Milford Wolpoff, a proponent of the multiregional hypothesis at the University of Michigan was quoted in the media as saying.

Others disagreed. Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, questioned whether the find was a true Homo sapiens.

“You need to keep in mind that ‘Homo sapiens’ for most Chinese scholars is not limited to anatomically modern humans,” he says. “For many of them, it is all ‘post Homo erectus,’ humans.”

Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum said that it was too early to make far-reaching conclusions. “From the parts preserved, this fossil could just as likely be related to preceding archaic humans, or even to the Neanderthals, who at times seem to have extended their range towards China.”

The present analysis of the mandible focused almost exclusively on determining the fossil’s age. The researchers said a follow-up study would give a more complete treatment on what exactly the find represents.

What has been described as the “largest ever” Neolithic rondel enclosures have been discovered in the Czech Republic.

A roudel enclosure is a circular earthwork which was probably fortified and served as a base camp or settlement during the Neolithic era (4000 BC to 2200 BC). Over 100 rondel enclosures have been uncovered in Europe so far.

The latest discovery — made by archaeologists during research accompanying the construction of a motorway bypass of Kolin, central Bohemia — contained four new rondels, two of which are the largest in Europe.

Two of the enclosures that archaeologists have uncovered near Kolin are 214 and 230 meters in diameter. The former was surrounded by four ditches, the biggest being 4.5 m deep and 14 m long.

The other two enclosures uncovered within the Kolin research in the past two years are 80 and 75 meters in diameter.

Besides Neolithic finds, the experts uncovered a number of valuable remains of settlements from the Paleolithic period, from the Bronze and Iron Ages, from the Roman era and the early Middle Ages.

Braveheart was a Johnny-Come-Lately. Archaeologists announced that they have discovered evidence of the earliest (to date) human habitation in Scotland which dates back to around 12,000 BC, or 14,000 years ago.

The latest issue of British Archaeology magazine reveals that shaped flints have been found in a field at Howburn Farm, Elsrickle, South Lanarkshire which date from the end of the last Ice Age.

According to that mag, they constitute the oldest certain evidence for humans in Scotland, and the most northern evidence for the earliest people in Britain.

They are similar to tools known to have been used in the Netherlands and northern Germany 14,000 years ago. Their most likely use would have been to kill reindeer, mammoth and giant elk and to cut up prey and prepare their skins.

Similar finds have been made in England, but they have mostly been south of the river Humber.

Up until now, the earliest evidence for humans in Scotland has come from sites such as Cramond, near Edinburgh.

Waste pits and discarded hazelnut shells found there have been dated to about 8,500 BC.

Tam Ward, from the Biggar Archaeology Group, which carried out the dig, said: “To push Scotland’s human history back by nearly 4,000 years is remarkable.”

The discovery conjures up a picture of wandering groups of hunters making their way across dry land where the North Sea is now, after the end of the Ice Age.

At first the flints were thought to date from the Neolithic period — about 3,000 BC. But their true significance was later realised by Torben Ballin, an expert in stone finds, and Alan Saville from the National Museums of Scotland.

Mr Saville told BBC Scotland that the diggers from Biggar were planning to go back to the site in the summer to explore it further.