Forget the simple out-of-Africa idea of how humans evolved. A huge array of fossils and genome studies has completely rewritten the story of how we came into being.

Until recently the Jebel Irhoud skull was thought to belong to a Neanderthal The Natural History Museum/Alamy

JEBEL IRHOUD, Morocco, 1961. In a barium mine in the foothills of the Atlas mountains, a miner makes a ghoulish discovery: a near-complete human skull embedded in the sediment. Archaeologists called in to investigate find that the skull is old, but not that old. It is filed away and largely forgotten.

Hinxton, UK, 2019. Robert Foley, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge, is giving the opening address at a three-day conference on human evolution. “What I’m pretty sure of is that, by…

This Fossil Friday features a replica of the famous Broken Hill cranium (Kabwe 1) of Homo rhodesiensis, which was found in 1921 in a metal mining quarry in Zambia and was often considered to be an archaic ancestor of modern humans. The dating of this skull, and hundreds of other Homo fossils from Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, was recently revised in a ground-breaking new study titled “Direct dating of human fossils and the ever-changing story of human evolution” by Grün & Stringer (2023), which represents an updated follow-up study to the previous work of Grün (2006).

What, Yet Another Rewriting?

Actually the study represents the summation of 37 years of collaborative research. Media reports about this impressive new study unsurprisingly featured headlines like “Recent fossil dating techniques change our ideas of the human evolution timeline” (NHM 2023) or “A new look at some old fossils has just rewritten the story of human evolution” (Spalding 2023). Why do we see such headlines over and over again? It is often claimed that the theory of evolution is as well established as the theory of gravity. When did you last see a headline like “New experiment rewrites the story of gravity“?

That said, the very extensive new study by the distinguished paleoanthropologists Rainer Grün and Chris Stringer undoubtedly produced several very important results:

The authors reviewed the dating of all major finds of fossil Homo from the past one million years, and critically discuss the U-series and ESR dating with special emphasis to different sources of errors such as leaching and overprinting. “The problem with bone is that it’s an open system. Uranium can get into the bone, allowing it to be dated, but more can also be added or washed out over time” said Professor Chris Stringer in the press release (NHM 2023). The scientists found that for some sites “the direct dates obtained do not fit the age estimates using other methods” and “in some cases the direct dates discussed here have challenged conventional thinking in palaeoanthropology.” They re-dated the earliest occurrences of Homo sapiens in Africa, the Levant and Europe, and confirm that “if Apidima 1 is indeed a H. sapiens, it documents the earliest known presence of our species in Eurasia with an estimated age of about 211 thousand years, while the Misliya cave material from Israel “still represents the earliest known derived H. sapiens in the Levant” with an age of 152 thousand years”. Both dates are much earlier than the traditional Out-of-Africa scenario would predict to find. The press release by the Natural History Museum says “The existence of early Homo sapiens in Europe was over 150,000 years earlier than first thought” (NHM 2023). The authors also discussed the more recently described human species of Homo floresiensis, H. luzonensis, H. naledi, and H. longi. They found an age of 134 thousand years for Homo luzonensis, refuting younger datings of only about 65 thousand years that were apparently distorted by secondary U-overprints. They also mention that skeletal characteristics led to a very incorrect initial age estimate for Homo naledi, four times older than the later radiometric dating, and said that “it may be worth mentioning that the postulated “morphological clock” was out by 1.35 million years for H. floresiensis”. Another example of Darwinian reasoning that massively failed the empirical test. Finally, they provided an updated summary of our present understanding of human evolution, with remarkable admissions such as the “co-existence of multiple lineages (in our view, species) over the last 2 million years, with at least 4 of these persisting into the last 100,000 years”, or that studies “show that searching for deep single points of origin for lineages like H. sapiens may ultimately be a futile task.”

The Take-Home Message

However, the most important take-home message is shown in figure 85 of Grün & Stringer (2023), which is based on Galway-Witham et al. (2019) and is featured below. It shows that several different alleged species of the genus Homo lived contemporary in the Pleistocene and experienced various instances of gene flow. This strongly suggests to me and some other critics of the current consensus that all these assumed species are just different populations of a single species Homo sapiens, that at best would qualify as subspecies or geographical races. I will provide a detailed argument for such reclassification in a book-length treatment of archaic Homo that is currently in preparation.

The most recent data on human fossils and their dating do not really support an evolutionary narrative from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, but a gap between ape-like australopithecines and real humans, as well as just a very diverse human species that even featured a greater morphological and genetic diversity in the past than today. Darwin critics with a Biblical perspective may find it interesting that this would resonate quite well with population genetic models based on a first pair with designed heterozygotic diversity and a significant population bottle neck (Sanford et al. 2018, Hössjer & Gauger 2019).

New dating of Pleistocene Homo, from Grün & Stringer 2023 fig. 85, fair use.

References

In 1863 the biologist T.H. Huxley proposed an African origin for humanity. Known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his ferocious defense of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, he had been struck by the distribution in Africa of our nearest living relatives, the common chimpanzee and the gorilla. (The latter had first been described by Europeans just sixteen years earlier, in 1847.) Darwin himself, however, demurred. Aware of the discovery of fossils of apes in Europe dating to the Miocene Epoch (around 23 to 5 million years ago), he opined that “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.”1

It was the pioneering and indefatigable Leakey family who found evidence for Huxley’s narrowly supported hypothesis. Louis and Mary Leakey began their search for fossils of human ancestors in Olduvai Gorge, in what is now Tanzania, in the 1930s. Amid the dust, sweat, and inconvenience of remote field camps, they simultaneously dug for fossils and raised three boys, often finding nothing of significance for years at a time. Then, in 1959, Mary discovered a fossilized skull that made headlines around the world. Paranthropus boisei, as it became known, belonged to a male upright ape who had stood around five feet high, weighed 110 pounds, and lived 1.8 million years ago. With powerful teeth and a prominent crest atop his braincase to anchor prodigious chewing muscles, he was an archetypal “ape man.” I recall as a child staring awestruck at a painting of Paranthropus that combined the features of gorillas, chimps, and humans, and that powerfully cemented in my mind the idea that Africa had been humanity’s cradle.

A few months after this discovery, the Leakeys made a second, even more significant find—a jaw attributable to an early member of our own genus. Homo habilis, or “Handy Man,” was a toolmaker hailed as the oldest “true” human ever discovered. After that, the discoveries just kept coming. In 1974 an international team in Ethiopia led by the paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson unearthed the skeleton of the three-foot-tall bipedal ape Australopithecus afarensis, who became popularly known as Lucy. With a catchy name and providing powerful, easy-to-understand support for an African origin, Lucy soon became a household name. Four years later Mary Leakey found 3.6-million-year-old hominin footprints at Laetoli, Tanzania, providing the earliest evidence of bipedalism.

In 1984 a team led by Louis and Mary Leakey’s son Richard unearthed a skeleton of Homo erectus at Lake Turkana in northern Kenya that was 90 percent complete. It seemed as if these astonishing African fossils illustrated most of the important steps in the human evolutionary story. When, beginning in the 1980s, genetic evidence suggested that our species (Homo sapiens) originated in Africa, the case seemed settled: Huxley, rather than Darwin, had been right about our origins. Some researchers began elaborating an all-encompassing Out of Africa theory, which had three components: (1) our hominin lineage (which split from chimpanzees between 13 and 7 million years ago) arose in Africa; (2) our genus, Homo, arose in Africa about 2.3 million years ago, and (3) our species originated in Africa about 300,000 years ago.

But there were always a few dissenters who, like Darwin, felt that the significance of fossilized fragments from Europe and Asia had been overlooked. They pointed to a suspicious gap in the African fossil record between 12 and 6 million years ago, just when the human and chimpanzee lineages were diverging. And some worried that the Leakeys and others had found fossils only where they looked for them—in Africa. If equivalent effort was put in elsewhere, skeptics argued, important finds might be made.

These objections had long been ignored, but now, in her splendid and important new book Ancient Bones, Madelaine Böhme and her collaborators Rüdiger Braun and Florian Breier have taken them up. Scientifically rigorous and written with a clarity and candor that create a gripping tale, it presents a powerful challenge to proponents of the Out of Africa hypothesis. The book begins with a foreword by one of the earliest and most prominent objectors to the hypothesis, the University of Toronto professor David R. Begun. Begun believes that apes became extinct in Africa around 12 million years ago and that our earliest direct ancestors evolved in Europe, which is rich in ape fossils from 12 to 6 million years old. Böhme, a terrestrial paleoclimatologist and paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen, has excavated and researched many specimens of European apes herself, and her account of the history of Europe’s lost apes is imbued with the sweat, grime, and triumph that is the lot of the fieldworker, and carries great authority.

As Böhme illustrates, the evolution of the human lineage is complex. A crucial event occurred around 25 million years ago, when the apes and Old World monkeys originated from a common ancestor in East Africa. The monkeys flourished in Africa, but as time went on the apes dwindled, until around 16 million years ago some reached Europe, where they thrived. Climatic changes in Europe, including increased seasonality, seem to have favored their diversification, and twelve genera are now known from the European Miocene, varying from gibbon-like creatures that swung through the forest canopy to gorilla-sized, presumably terrestrial ramblers.

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As oak and beech trees started to crowd out the tropical vegetation that had dominated Europe till then, the apes were forced to alter their diet. Depending on which part of Europe they lived in, they had to go for between two and four months without fresh leaves, fruits, or nuts. Around 15 million years ago, a genetic mutation occurred that resulted in their inability to produce uricase, the enzyme used by mammals to break down uric acid so that it can be excreted in urine. This mutation led to high levels of uric acid in the apes’ blood, allowing them to rapidly convert fructose into fat. And fat, stored in the liver and other tissues, is an energy reserve that made it possible for the apes to survive lean seasons.

I often curse this adaptation, for I’m a victim of that singularly painful condition, gout, which is caused by a buildup of uric acid in the blood. Were it not for the availability of uricase in pill form (thank God for modern medicine!), I’d be a bedridden old grouch by now. But gout is just one of the many “diseases of civilization” inflicted on us by this adaptation in our ape ancestors. Diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease are all related to some degree to the loss, in some long-extinct European ape, of the ability to remove uric acid from the blood.

One of Böhme’s most important fossil finds was made near Kaufbeuren, in southern Germany. There, while visiting a lignite pit, she examined small black lumps of what was supposedly coal, only to discover that they were ancient bones. The deposit was about to be mined and destroyed, and, with no alternative, Böhme asked that twenty-five tons of fossil-rich sediment be scooped up and dumped where paleontologists could sort through it without interrupting the quarrying. After two field seasons of arduous work, she recovered 15 percent of the skeleton of a single great ape, along with fragments from three others. Named Danuvius guggenmosi, the creature had lived 11.62 million years ago, in a subtropical environment. At just three feet tall and weighing around sixty-five pounds, Danuvius had big, powerful thumbs and toes and an elongated lower back that permitted an upright stance. Böhme quips that “from the waist up he looked like an ape and from the waist down he looked like an early hominin.” Danuvius is in fact one of the candidates for the last common ancestor of chimps and humans.

As the climate cooled later in the Miocene, savanna replaced forest in some parts of Europe, and this had a big impact on the continent’s apes. According to Böhme, a crucial piece of evidence indicating what happened was unearthed in June 1944, when besieged German soldiers dug a bunker near Athens. Bruno von Freyberg, a geology professor from Erlangen who was then serving in the German army, asked his workers to alert him to any fossils they encountered. Despite having lost an arm in World War I, Freyberg personally unearthed the finds, including the jaw of an ape, then sent his fossils to the Natural History Museum in Berlin for safekeeping. But the museum was bombed on February 3, 1945, and the priceless jawbone was severely damaged, losing most of its teeth.

In 1969 the great paleoanthropologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald examined the damaged bone and named it Graecopithecus freybergi—Freyberg’s Greek ape. But it was so extensively mangled that other researchers concluded it was not identifiable, and so sought to suppress Koenigswald’s name. The jawbone might have been forgotten altogether but for Böhme, who tracked it down to a long-forgotten safe in a university department. When she had the jaw x-rayed, she saw that the roots of the teeth shared unique features with those of the subfamily Homininae, to which humans belong. She also redated the find, establishing that it was 7.175 million years old.

Her conclusion that the oldest human ancestor had lived in Greece around six to seven million years ago was so inconsistent with the dominant Out of Africa hypothesis that the paleoanthropological community largely reacted with stunned silence. But then, within months of Böhme’s analysis of Graecopithecus being published in 2017, a second, even more stunning and unexpected discovery was announced.

In 2002 the Polish paleontologist Gerard Gierliński had been vacationing with his girlfriend near Trachilos, Crete. On a slab of rock by the water he saw oblong marks that he recognized as fossilized footprints. But he didn’t follow up until 2010, when he mentioned them to a colleague; the two scientists hypothesized that the footprints might have been made by a bipedal ape. Analysis revealed that the feet that had left the tracks were small (between 4 and 8.5 inches long) and had five toes, a pronounced ball of the foot, and a big toe aligned with the other toes. The feet that left the prints undeniably resembled humans’ feet but lacked some features, such as an arch. Astonishingly, dating revealed that the prints were made more than six million years ago, when Crete was a long, southward-projecting peninsula of Europe.

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I recall my own skepticism upon reading of this find: the discovery of six-million-year-old humanlike footprints on a Greek island seemed too outlandish. And evidently the paleoanthropological community felt similarly, for Gierliński and his colleagues had tried in vain for six and a half years to get their results published. According to Böhme, the manuscript was repeatedly rejected by anonymous reviewers whose reasoning was often difficult to decipher. But following the publication of Böhme’s reanalysis of Graecopithecus, Gierliński’s paper on the Trachilos footprints finally made it to press.

Böhme thinks that the tracks could have been left by Graecopithecus around the time upright apes migrated from Europe back to Africa, allowing them to repopulate a continent that they had been absent from for six million years. Whatever the case, there is no doubt that Graecopithecus and the Trachilos footprints present a strong challenge to the first part of the Out of Africa theory.

To most proponents of the Out of Africa theory, many of whom have invested lifetimes excavating sites in Africa, claims about human origins in Europe are heretical. A sense of just how high the stakes are can be gained from the controversy surrounding the discovery at the turn of the twenty-first century of the skull of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, a hominid species. The skull—which was found in the desert in Chad and studied by Professor Michel Brunet, then at the University of Poitiers—is thought to be six million years old and has been used to support the theory that the oldest human ancestor lived in North Africa six to seven million years ago. This finding has been widely accepted and celebrated: there is a street on the campus in Poitiers named for Brunet, and a parking garage named for Toumaï, as the skull is popularly known.

The skull is horribly fractured, and the area where it articulated with the spinal column is heavily damaged. The reconstruction by Brunet’s team made it appear that the skull sat atop the vertebral column, as it does in bipedal apes. But others disagreed, saying that the articulation was farther back, as in gorillas. Indeed, critics say, the skull has a number of gorilla-like features and may belong to an ancestral gorilla.

There matters might have remained, if not for the publication of a photograph of the skull as it was upon discovery. It lay in sand, surrounded by a scatter of other bones including a thighbone that was possibly part of the same individual as the Sahelanthropus skull. While Brunet was doing fieldwork, Aude Bergeret, a Ph.D. student who was studying the bones in her lab, concluded that the thighbone belonged to a great ape and that Sahelanthropus was not bipedal. According to Böhme, when Bergeret’s assertion became known, “the thighbone disappeared without a trace and the doctoral student lost her position at the university.”

In 2018 Bergeret and a colleague offered to give a presentation on the thighbone at the annual meeting of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, but they were refused. “Could it be,” Böhme asks, “that Michel Brunet, one of the icons of French science, Knight of the Légion d’honneur, recipient of the Ordre national du Mérite, did not want to be challenged?”

Questions about Sahelanthropus continue to pile up. Because the bones were found not in the sediments that preserved them but in sand drifts, it is unclear how old they are. And is Sahelanthropus an early gorilla or a member of the human lineage? The fossil record of gorillas is almost entirely unknown, so the discovery of an ancestral gorilla would be of huge significance. But it’s hard to imagine a street in a university being named for the discoverer of such a fossil.

The second part of the Out of Africa hypothesis states that the genus Homo evolved in Africa. Böhme strongly challenges this, arguing instead that our genus evolved in a great, now fragmented grassy woodland known as Savannastan, which covered parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa 2.6 million years ago. In support of the idea, she cites 1.8-million-year-old Homo skeletons from Georgia and, more intriguingly, a jaw and a few isolated teeth found in cave sediments in Longgupo Cave, in Wushan County in China’s Sichuan Province. The Chinese fossils were named as a new species, Homo wushanensis, by researchers in 1991, and according to Böhme the remains are between 2.6 and 2.48 million years old. As the oldest Homo habilis remains from Africa are only 2.3 million years old, the dating of the Chinese finds, if verified, would pose a direct challenge to part two of the Out of Africa hypothesis.

But interpretation of the fragmented remains of Homo wushanensis is complicated. In 2009 Russell Ciochon, an American researcher who described Homo wushanensis, declared that he had made a mistake. The jaw and some of the teeth did not belong to an early human, he said, but to one or more “mystery apes.”2 His retraction was acclaimed by some as a welcome act of intellectual honesty in a field characterized by fierce rivalry. Yet it has hardly settled matters. Böhme, for example, notes that stone tools were also found in Longgupo Cave, suggesting the presence of early humans. Others have speculated that the tools (along with some of the teeth) may have found their way into the deposit from more recent sediments, but Böhme is not satisfied by this explanation. Instead, she asks of Ciochon’s retraction, “Why the spectacular retreat? Was it to avoid jeopardizing the Out of Africa…hypothesis?”

Böhme, it seems, is just as determined to defend her hypothesis as the Out of Africanistas are to defend theirs.

Ancient Bones makes clear that Graecopithecus and the Trachilos footprints provide convincing evidence that our earliest direct ancestors evolved in Europe, and that they were walking upright as early as six million years ago. But the book, I think, is overly confident in its challenge to the idea that the genus Homo arose in Africa. That’s because, while there are intriguing clues that Homo may have been present in Europe or Asia before the oldest African finds (which date to around 2.3 million years ago), the evidence is far from conclusive. And of course the third part of the Out of Africa hypothesis, that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, remains unchallenged—though the recent discovery that all living people carry genes from other hominin lineages, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, which appear to have evolved in Europe and Asia, respectively, adds an intriguing twist to the tale.

What Ancient Bones does make clear, however, is that we place far too much emphasis on rewarding the discovery of our ancestors. In science, a discovery that leads in an unexpected direction, or even to a dead end, is often as productive as a lucky find. If we could only get past the great egos that swell in the field of paleoanthropology and reward the search as much as we do the discovery! But that, perhaps, would require an objectivity and generosity that aren’t entirely human.

Gateways into a new continent

There has always been an ocean separating Asia and Australia. At times this distance was reduced but the earliest travellers still had to navigate across large stretches of water.

For much of its history Australia was joined to New Guinea, forming a landmass called Sahul. These countries were finally separated by rising sea levels about 8,000 years ago. Genetic evidence supports the close ties between these two countries – the Indigenous peoples from these regions are more closely related to each other than to anyone else in the world, suggesting a recent common ancestry.

There are a number of likely paths of migration across Asia and into Sahul. These are based on the shortest possible route and take into consideration the land bridges that would appear during times of low sea levels. However, travel may have also occurred when sea levels were high. High sea levels would have reduced the amount of usable land and increased the population pressure. During these times it may have been necessary to expand into new areas.

Changing sea levels

Changing sea levels have significantly affected the geography of South-east Asia and Australia and the migration patterns of prehistoric peoples. During times of low sea levels the travelling distance between Timor and Sahul would have been reduced to about 90 kilometres.

Present sea levels are higher than they have been for most of the last million years. When water is locked up in the polar ice caps (known as an Ice Age) the sea level drops. When the climate becomes warmer, the ice melts and the sea level rises again.

The original seafarers

The settlement of Australia is the first unequivocal evidence of a major sea crossing and rates as one of the greatest achievements of early humans. However the motive and circumstances regarding the arrival of the first Australians is a matter for conjecture. It may have been a deliberate attempt to settle a new territory or an accident after being caught in monsoon winds.

The lack of preservation of any ancient boat means archaeologists will probably never know what kind of craft was used for the journey. None of the boats used by Aboriginal people in ancient times are suitable for major voyages. The most likely suggestion has been rafts made of bamboo, a material common in Asia.

The early occupation of Australia

The earliest dates for human occupation of Australia come from sites in the Northern Territory. The Madjedbebe (previously called Malakunanja II) rock shelter in Arnhem Land has a widely accepted date of about 50,000 years old. Reports of a date close to around 65,000 years old (Nature, 2017), which was contentious at the time, have been rebutted by Allen & O’Connell in 2020. Molecular clock estimates, genetic studies and archaeological data all suggest the initial settlement of Sahul and Australia by modern humans occurred around 48,000–50,000 years ago.

Over the last few decades, a significant number of archaeological sites dated at more than 30,000 years old have been discovered. By this time all of Australia, including the arid centre and Tasmania, was occupied. The drowning of many coastal sites by rising sea levels has destroyed what would have been the earliest occupation sites.

Recently published dates of 120,000 years ago for the site of Moyjil in Warrnambool, Victoria, offer intriguing, but unlikely, possibilities of much earlier occupation (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 2018). The site contains remains of shellfish, crabs and fish in what may be a ‘midden’, but definitive proof of human occupation is lacking and investigations are ongoing.

The First Australians

Much of our knowledge about the earliest people in Australia comes from archaeology. The physical remains of human activity that have survived in the archaeological record are largely stone tools, rock art and ochre, shell middens and charcoal deposits and human skeletal remains. These all provide information on the tremendous length and complexity of Aboriginal Australian culture.

Human Remains

The oldest human fossil remains found in Australia date to around 40,000 years ago – roughly 10,000 years after the earliest archaeological evidence of human occupation. Nothing, therefore, is known about the physical appearance of the humans that first entered the continent. What is clear is that Aboriginal people living in Australia between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago had much larger bodies and more robust skeletons than they do today and showed a wide range of physical variation.

Stone tools

Stone tools in Australia, as in other parts of the world, changed and developed through time. Some early types, such as wasted blades, core tools, large flake scrapers and split pebble choppers continue to be made and used right up to today.

About 6000 years ago, new and specialised tools such as points, backed blades and thumbnail scrapers became common. Significant variation between the tool kits of different regions also appeared. Prototypes for this technology appeared earlier in Asia, suggesting this innovation was introduced into Australia.

The ground stone technique produces tools with a more durable and even edge, although not as sharp as a chipped tool. The oldest ground stone tools appear in Australia about 10,000 years before they appear in Europe, suggesting that early Australians were more technologically advanced in some of their tool manufacturing techniques than was traditionally thought.

Rock art

Rock art, including painted and carved forms, plays a significant role in Aboriginal culture and has survived in the archaeological record for over 30,000 years. In age and abundance Australian Aboriginal rock art is comparable to world-renowned European cave sites such as those at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain.

It is probable that rock art was part of the culture of the first Australians. Its exact purpose is unknown but it is likely that from the earliest times rock art would have formed part of religious ritual activity, as is common in modern hunter-gatherer societies.

Ochre and mineral pigments

Mineral pigments, such as ochre, provide the oldest evidence for human arrival in Australia. Used pigments have been found in the earliest occupation levels of many sites, with some pieces dated at about 50,000 years old. This suggests that art was practised from the beginning of the first settlement. Natural pigments were probably used for a range of purposes including burials, cave painting, decoration of objects and body art. Such usage still occurs today.

Ochre is an iron oxide found in a range of colours from yellow to red and brown. Red ochre is particularly important in many desert cultures due to the belief that it represents the blood of ancestral beings and can provide protection and strength. Ochre is used by grinding it into a powder and mixing it with a fluid, such as water, blood or saliva.

Living sites

Archaeological evidence for living sites of Ancient Aboriginal peoples comes in a variety of forms including fishing traps and weirs, stone-base huts, possible fireplaces and remains of meals and cooking activities. The evidence indicates that lifestyle practices varied across the continent and differed depending on climate, environment and natural resources.

Shell middens are the most obvious remains of meals and are useful because they provide insight into ancient Aboriginal diets and past environments and can also be radiocarbon dated to establish the age of a site.

Important Sites

Coobool Creek

The Coobool Creek collection consists of the remains of 126 individuals excavated from a sand ridge at Coobool Crossing, New South Wales, in 1950. After their excavation, they became part of the University of Melbourne collection until they were returned to the Aboriginal community for reburial in 1985.

The remains date from 9000 to 13,000 years old and are significant because of their large size when compared with Aboriginal people who appeared within the last 6000 years. They are physically similar to Kow Swamp people with whom they shared the cultural practice of artificial cranial deformation.

Kow Swamp

This ancient burial site in northern Victoria was excavated between 1968 and 1972. The human skeletons discovered here were extremely significant because they were accurately dated between 9500 to 14,000 years ago and demonstrated substantial differences between ancient and more recent Aboriginal people.

The remains of over forty individuals have been found at Kow Swamp and include those of men, women and children. This burial site is one of the largest from this time period anywhere in the world. Many of the skeletons have a greater skeletal mass, more robust jaw structures and larger areas of muscle attachment than in contemporary Aboriginal men. The female skeletons from this region also show similar differences when compared with modern Aboriginal women.

Key remains:

‘Kow Swamp 1’. Human skull rediscovered in 1967 in the National Museum of Victoria by Alan Thorne and Phillip Macumber. It is dated at 10,000 years old. The skull’s original burial location was traced through police reports, and excavations at Kow Swamp began soon after.

‘Kow Swamp 5’. This 13,000-year-old skull is one of the better-preserved examples from Kow Swamp. It has a greater skeletal mass, a more robust jaw structure and larger areas of muscle attachment than in contemporary Aboriginal men.

‘Kow Swamp 14’. These remains were of a male skeleton with knees were drawn up under the chest with the hands in front of the face. In other Kow Swamp burials the skeleton was fully extended. It is not known why different burial positions were used.

Lake Mungo

The oldest human remains in Australia were found at Lake Mungo in south-west New South Wales, part of the Willandra Lakes system. This site has been occupied by Aboriginal people from at least 47,000 years ago to the present. This age range is supported by numerous geochronological ageing techniques including Radiocarbon (C14) determinations, Optically Stimulated Thermoluminesence (OSL) and Thermoluminesence (TL). Lake Mungo has been devoid of water for the last 18,000 years and is now a dry lakebed. In the past, lower evaporation and higher runoff from the Great Dividing Range allowed the lakes to fill, supporting plentiful freshwater resources such as fish and shellfish, and making the lakes a valuable source of food for the people that occupied the area.

Key remains:

Mungo Woman, also referred to as ‘Lake Mungo 1’ (WLH 1), was discovered in 1968. At 42,000 years old, this is the most securely dated human burial in Australia and the earliest ritually cremated remains found anywhere in the world. The cremation process shrinks bone and has made the skeleton of this originally small-bodied woman even smaller. Dr Alan Thorne reconstructed the skull from over 300 fragments.

Mungo Man, also known as ‘Lake Mungo 3’ or (WLH 3) was discovered in 1974. Unlike Mungo Woman’s cremation, Mungo Man was laid out on his back for burial and covered in red ochre before being buried in the beach sands that bordered the lake. There has been some debate over the age of this burial and while dates ranging from 26,000 to 60,000 years old have been obtained, an age closer to 42,000 years old is widely accepted.

Mungo DNA

In 2001, Australian scientists claimed that they had extracted mitochondrial DNA from ‘Mungo Man’ and nine other ancient Australians. They concluded that the genes of the modern-looking ‘Mungo Man’ were different from modern humans, proving that not all Homo sapiens have the same recent ancestor as stated in the ‘Out of Africa’ theory. These claims are controversial and could not be replicated in further studies in 2016 (PNAS 2016), and the only DNA that could be recovered from Mungo Man was European and certainly a contaminant.

Ancient DNA is easily contaminated and rarely survives for 30,000 years in conditions like those found in Australia. A complete mitochondrial genome from WLH 4, found several kilometres from Mungo Man, has been reconstructed. This individual was probably buried after the lakes had dried up in the Holocene (less than 10,000 years ago) and contains DNA that falls within the modern human range.

Cohuna

A skull was found in 1925 at Cohuna, north-west Kow Swamp, Victoria, and is undated. However, the similarity between this skull and the Kow Swamp people suggests they are both from a similar time period. This skull’s long, high, flat forehead reflects the characteristics of cranial deformation and its teeth and palate are larger than the current Australian average.

In recent Evolution News articles (Bechly 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2018), I have commented on paleoanthropological discoveries that overturned the cherished out-of-Africa scenario. Now, the rewriting of the story of human evolution continues with undampened enthusiasm. In a special report series, “Rewriting human evolution,” the journal New Scientist featured an article “Who are you? How the story of human origins is being rewritten” (Barras 2017) reviewing a lot of this modern research. This summer the article “Asia’s mysterious role in the early origins of humanity” (Douglas 2018a) was appropriately added to the series, because indeed many of the revolutionary new discoveries were made in China and the Indian subcontinent.

Rewritings from East Asia

The more recent East Asian rewritings of human prehistory commenced with the re-dating of two hominid fossils and stone artifacts, from Longgupo cave in Central China, as 2.48 million years old (Han et al. 2017), and the description of 2.588 million year old cut marks on bovid bones from the Siwalik Himalayan foothills in India (Dambricourt Malassé 2016, Dambricourt Malassé et al. 2016a, 2016b). These cut marks are so precise and required such a detailed knowledge of bovid anatomy that an anthropic origin seems the only possible explanation. These two findings are remarkable because they not only predate the previous oldest fossil remains of the genus Homo outside of Africa (from Dmanisi in Georgia about 1.85 million years ago), but even predate most of the oldest Homo fossils from Africa, except for a recently described single jawbone from Ledi-Geraru in Ethiopia (Villmoare et al. 2015), dated to 2.8 million year ago. Therefore, the new discoveries suggest either an earlier origin and migration of our genus Homo to Asia, or a prior migration of australopithecine hominins into Asia, or even an independent development of non-hominin tool-using apes.

This year a study by Zhu et al. (2018) documented hominin occupation of the Chinese Loess Plateau near Shangchen from 2.12 to 1.26 million years ago, based on a continuous sequence of 96 excavated stone tools. Consequently the presence of a very early Homo species in Asia is confirmed beyond reasonable doubt and “makes it necessary to reconsider the timing of initial dispersal of early hominins in the Old World” (Barras 2018a, Kappelman 2018). Unsurprisingly, this discovery was celebrated by the international media as another rewriting of the human story (Choi 2018, Greshko 2018b).

The Dali Skull from China

Last year came a ground-breaking new study of the famous Dali skull from China. This turned out to be 268,000 to 258,000 years old and belonged to a human that was morphologically intermediate between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. I have already commented here (Bechly 2017c) on the important implications of this new research that refuted a purely African origin of modern humans (Qiu 2016, Athreya & Wu 2017, Bae et al. 2017, Douglas 2018b).

The very recent review of Bae et al. (2017) suggested a migration of Homo sapiens into East Asia 120,000 to 70,000 years ago, which already was a significant departure from the previous consensus that assumed a single out-of-Africa migration wave about 60,000 years ago.

But earlier this year even this revised scenario was questioned in a new study by Hershkovitz et al. (2018), who described an upper jaw fragment of Homo sapiens from the Misliya Cave in Israel, which could be dated to 177,000 years. It thus represents the earliest evidence for modern humans outside of Africa, 50,000 years earlier than previously thought (Callaway 2018, Pickerell 2018). The new discovery fits well with 175,000-year-old stone tools from other sites in the Middle East, which rather resemble those used by Homo sapiens in East Africa (Groucutt et al. 2015).

“Swiss Army Knife” of Prehistoric Tools

The next rewriting followed with a Nature paper by Akhilesh et al. (2018), who described more than 7,000 stone tools from Attirampakkam in India, dated 385,000 to 172,000 years ago and identified as more advanced Levallois (mode III) stone tool technology, which has also been dubbed the “Swiss Army knife” of prehistoric tools (Anonymous 2018). This pushed back the advent of Middle Palaeolithic culture in Asia for about 100,000 to 250,000 years. The authors did not dare to attribute the tool culture to a specific human species, but at least mentioned that previous evidence had suggested that Middle Palaeolithic culture spread with modern humans out of Africa around 125,000 year ago or later (Greshko 2018a, Kamrani 2018, Marshall 2018). In Africa and Europe the Levallois culture appears at a similar time and is generally associated with modern humans and sometimes Neanderthals but never Homo erectus. Of course some Darwinist paleoanthropologists remained skeptical about the new discovery. They doubted that the tools really can be attributed to Levallois culture, or they suggested that artifact might have been developed independently by archaic humans rather than imported by more modern humans (Katz 2018, Wong 2018). It seems strange how much difference in interpretation is possible in a simple stone tool and its attribution to a certain technological stage, which was also a reason why the Levallois concept had been criticized in the past as reflecting subjective bias (Perpére 1986). Just like paleontology in general, paleoanthropology often is a very soft science, resting on many speculative interpretations.

Anyway, the next rewriting did not take long and may silence the critics. Just a few days ago Hu et al. (2018) published their research in the journal Nature. They describe 170,000-years-old Levallois stone tools from the Middle Pleistocene of Guanyindong in southwest China. New Scientist comments, wait for it, “Complex stone tools in China may re-write our species’ ancient history” (Barras 2018b). Yet another rewrite? Not again!

An Honorary Mention

Finally, an honorary mention of a minor Asian rewriting should go to a recent study by Shipton et al. (2018) on hominin remains from the Arabian peninsula. The authors suggested the weird hypothesis that laziness led to the extinction of Homo erectus, since the latter used only “least-effort strategies” for tool-making (ANU 2018), in contrast with Neanderthals and modern humans. This hardly seems plausible considering the fact that Homo erectus survived for at least 1.8 million years and spread over three continents with very different habitats, building spears and rafts, etc. It is also hardly compatible with the claim that Neanderthals and modern humans evolved from a Homo erectus-like stock. This kind of reasoning reminds one of the racist stories about the superiority of Europeans over “primitive races” told by Darwinian anthropologists for a long time — that is, until it became politically incorrect and was recognized as a peril to your chances of getting public research funding. Nevertheless, this dangerous way of thinking is clearly still inherent in Darwinian science, having been only superficially tamed by the constraints of modern Western culture.

Recommended: A Dose of Skepticism

Since many evolutionists tend to deliberately misrepresent any critique, it must be clearly stated: there is absolutely no problem at all with “rewriting” in the sense of scientific progress! The reason all these new discoveries are so noteworthy is not because they represent the usual progress of science, but because they overturn the standard textbook wisdom that had been promulgated as undisputable fact for many years. All who doubted this “truth” were dressed down by Darwinists as ideologically motivated know-nothings. Not only skeptics of Darwinism, but even a few maverick evolutionary anthropologists, who still favored a multiregional model of human origins over the out-of-Africa story, were often marginalized as fringe scientists or even crackpots. History teaches that a healthy skepticism, including about the new “rewritten” consensus on human origins, is the most appropriate attitude. There is no fact of evolution in general and also no fact of human evolutionary origins in particular, but just a collection of very tentative hypotheses with relatively weak and controversial supporting evidence. Alternative hypotheses like intelligent design are far from being falsified by the human fossil record and remain legitimate players in the field of human origins research, especially when they better explain the totality of available data.

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Photo: Levallois stone tool technology, by Muséum de Toulouse [CC BY-SA 3.0].