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.

For many years, evolutionists claimed that Neanderthals were part of the human evolutionary chain. This belief was blown out of the water with the advent of several DNA studies (here, here and here) which have conclusively shown that there is no evidence of Neanderthal DNA having contributed to the Homo sapiens gene pool.

The evolutionists then quietly dropped Neanderthal from the evolutionary path, and carried on as before.

Now, as I have said often enough, I don’t have a problem with the theory of evolution per se – in fact it is a lot more plausible than the creation theory – but my problem has always been the single-origin theory and the way it is manipulated for political purposes to “prove” we are all African, the same etc. etc.

I have always favoured the distinctly un-pc multiregional theory, which argues that the main racial groupings which comprise modern Homo sapiens developed quite independently in disparate geographic areas, at differing time periods.

This has always seemed to be the more logical explanation for racial speciation, and would certainly better explain that phenomena better than the single origin “out of Africa” theory which asks us to believe that racial speciation occurred in the short (comparatively) span of 100,000 years or so since “we all left Africa.”

And therein lies the rub: because the crazed leftist academics who dominate the “halls of learning” these days even deny that race is a valid taxonomic discipline, they support the “out of Africa” theory precisely because it makes the concept of racial speciation so difficult to accept.

But races there are, and that is the reality.

So I wonder what they will think of the very latest DNA research into Neanderthals, which has now shown that even that group was racially split into defined geographic areas?

According to the new paper, “Genetic Evidence of Geographical Groups among Neanderthals” (Virginie Fabre, Silvana Condemi, Anna Degioanni*Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Bio-culturelle, UMR6578 Université de la Méditerranée, CNRS-EFS, Marseille, France, published April 15, 2009), Neanderthals can be divided into at least three groups: one in western Europe, a second in the southern area and a third in western Asia.

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After analysing all the existing genetic data, the researchers plotted out plausibility studies for all the possible permutations (“Model 1: a unique population; Model 2: derived populations; Model 3: three derived populations; Model 4: A heterogeneous derived population”) and concluded that the only reasonable explanation is model 3.

 

“The third model correspond to an ancestral population which gives rise to three sub-populations: one in the West, another in the East and one in the South,” the paper reports.

“This southern population corresponds to the paleoanthropological hypothesis concerning the presence of a southern population. According to the geographical barriers and morphological evidence, we have established three different divisions. The fossil of El Sidron from a paleogeographic standpoint is closer to French fossils than to Italian and Croatian fossils. On the basis of morphological data it might be closer to the southern fossils (model 3b). Due to its geographical position, the fossil of Mezmaïskaya, discovered in the Caucasus, might be placed either in the eastern (model 3a) or in the western group (model 3b and 3c).

“For model 3 (a, b, c) we made the same assumptions as in model 2 regarding population growth, migration, population sizes, and generation time. Forty eight simulations of this model have been tested, sixteen by grouping. Most measures of genetic diversity fit the observed measures more closely than in the previous models. Indeed, if we consider a growing population in which migration occurs, we see plausible and best values of P(Co|C) for all models (3a, 3b and 3c) for simulation sets with twelve or nine sequences. The most precise fit is that of model 3c, which presents values of P(Co|C) closest to 0.5. If we consider a growing population with no migration, only model 3c presents the best values of P(Co|C). Thus models three, which posit three groups among Neanderthals, and assume a growing population, seem to be most realistic, and model 3c is the most plausible one.”

In other words, there were distinct races of Neanderthals, as there are races amongst Homo sapiens.

Some of us will not be surprised.

Here is something which I found to be most interesting: Evidence of the earliest “humans,” living more than 1 million years ago in western Europe, were recently revealed in the journal Nature.

Part of a human lower jawbone, including several teeth, were found along with stone tools and animal bones at the Atapuerca site, Sima del Elefante, in northern Spain.

Eudald Carbonell, of  the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona in Spain, and his team, dated the human fossil remains to between 1.1 and 1.2 million years old, making them the oldest in western Europe so far.

Now that is something, and an issue which I thought really casued problems for the “Out of Africa” theory, which held that humans emerged from Africa circa 70,000 years ago, and then diversified (by magic, it seems) into the various different races.

Early Homo erectus fossils are known from Dmanisi in Georgia and are dated to about 1.7 million years ago.

This new find is significant because the human remains were found together with tools and animal bones and they show signs of human activity such as hammering and cut marks. This means the evidence for human occupation is stronger.

The team used a combination of 3 different techniques to date the fossils. One was called palaeomagnetism, which analyses past changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. Biostratigraphy (using non-human fossils) enabled an estimate of the age relative to other sites. And cosmogenic nuclides, a relatively new method, was used to measure the radioactive decay of quartz isotopes in sediments.

Traditional Out of Africa Theory

Traditional “Out of Africa” theory argues that modern humans, or Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago and migrated out about 50-70,000 years ago.

Now to my cynical mind, that has always smacked of a modicum of PC theory, implying that somehow we all came from Africa so we are all the same etc. etc., when, of course, the record quite clearly shows that the differing levels of attainment are vast between the continents.

Now, the evolutionists claim there were much earlier migrations out of Africa of more ancient “human relatives,” such as Homo erectus.

The emerging archaeological evidence, however suggests that southern Europe began to be colonised from western Asia, not long after humans had supposedly emerged from Africa, something which most evolutionists would have doubted even five years ago.

Professor Phillipe Rushton Comments

I had the great fortune -and pleasure – of meeting up recently with Professor Phillipe Rushton, the world-famous evolutionary scientist from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, who is well aware of my scepticism of the Out of Africa theory, and who mocks me for it.

I pointed out the Nature journal announcement to Professor Rushton, and this was his reply:

“The story you sent shows there were humans in Spain and Europe 1.2 million years ago. But they were very unlikely to have been Homo sapiens. Everyone agrees that Homo erectus came out of Africa first, maybe even 1.5 million years ago and made it to become Java man and Beijing Man and in Europe likely evolved into Neanderthals and Heidelberg Man and now even Homo antecessor (as the new find is being called).

“There is no agreed upon taxonomy for these various versions of “early man” and every anthropologist who discovers something new tries (understandably) to make it as unique as possible. There could indeed be various species of early man. Depends on whether you are a “splitter” or “joiner” when it comes to making up the groups.

“But, here’s the point. Starting in Africa about 100,000 years ago came a very gracile skeleton. Much, much, more gracile than anything that had come before or compared to anything that has been found in Europe or Asia prior to 50,000 yeas ago. This we know from long bones like the femur which have survived. The teeth are smaller too as are the jaws while the crania are either the same size or larger but again also with thinner cranial bones.

“Robusticity and muscularity typically goes with the more primitive types of species. Buried along with these gracile specimens are much more advanced tool technology, artifacts, and evidence of trade (stones from far away regions). By contrast, the stone technology of the robust humans they replaced didn’t really evolve much over hundreds of thousands of years.

“The gracile “Africans” (as the politically correct like to call them, although they are actually Out-of-Africa) had bows and arrows and spear throwers so they could attack animals from a distance. It looks like the robust types they replaced had to jab spears into beasts close up, at least as is inferred from the numerous broken bones they seem to have suffered. Large bones also go along with great muscularity, which we can tell from the muscle markings left on the bones.

“So, the skeletal evidence and the archeological evidence joins with the DNA evidence to suggest there was a major speciation event out of Africa about 100,000 years ago with replacement of everything that preceded them. I doubt personally if there was cross-breeding but if there was, it’s very doubtful there are any remnants left. It would show up in the DNA.

“There are also craniometric studies that map onto DNA studies to show that (relatively speaking) Australian Aborigines and Chinese and Bushmen and Anglo-Saxons are all kissing cousins in genetic distance terms compared to Neanderthals or Heidelberg Man. The latter are humungulous outliers when you look at a cluster analysis with all the various modern human groups placed on the same metric. Of course I’m not saying there aren’t huge differences between East Asians and Africans, only that these become small when say erectus is put into the comparison.

“Some of this is even mentioned in the Abridged Edition of my Race, Evolution, and Behavior.  Its covered even more in the Unabridged Edition of my book. With more human fossils discovered, and better DNA abstracted, the picture could change.”

So there you have it.

Me? I still have my doubts, but that’s just me.