Another Nail in the Coffin for "Out of Africa" Theory

[Rev.Cambeul]

Europe the birthplace of humankind, not Africa: scientists

http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/evolution/scientists-discover-europe-was-the-birthplace-of-mankind-not-africa/news-story/ed5db48386d9ba6a034f964678de8f3a

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/05/22/europe-birthplace-mankind-not-africa-scientists-find

EVERYTHING we might know about the history of human evolution could be wrong, with scientists postulating that Africa may not be the birthplace of man.

Scientists have traced the first hominid species to Europe some 7.2 million years ago, thanks to the discovery of two apelike fossils with human-like teeth in Bulgaria and Greece.

Until the unearthing, experts believed human lineage split from apes some seven million years ago in Africa.

The findings, published by an international team of researchers in the journal Plos One, claim the fossils are solid evidence evolution started in the Mediterranean region 200,000 years earlier than it did in Africa.

Researcher Professor Nikolai Spassov said the creature, named Graecopithecus freybergi (El Graeco), likely saw a shift towards bipedalism to help find new food sources in eastern Europe's open savanna.

"This study changes the ideas related to the knowledge about the time and the place of the first steps of the humankind," he told The Telegraph.

"Graecopithecus is not an ape. He is a member of the tribe of hominins and the direct ancestor of homo.

"The food of the Graecopithecus was related to the rather dry and hard savanna vegetation, unlike that of the recent great apes which are living in forests. Therefore, like humans, he has wide molars and thick enamel.

"To some extent this is a newly discovered missing link. But missing links will always exist, because evolution is an infinite chain of subsequent forms. Probably El Graeco's face will resemble a great ape, with shorter canines."

Lead researcher Professor Madelaine Böhme said computer tomography helped visualise the internal structures of the fossils, which showed the roots of an upper premolar tooth were fused — this led to the conclusion the species was a hominid.

"While great apes typically have two or three separate and diverging roots, the roots of Graecopithecus converge and are partially fused — a feature that is characteristic of modern humans, early humans and several pre-humans," she said.

As the Mediterranean Sea would periodically dry during this time, researchers believed the early hominids were able to pass between Europe and Africa.

Professor Böhme said the theory would alter the very beginning of human history if accepted.

"Our findings may eventually change our ideas about the origin of humanity. I personally don't think that the descendants of Graecopithecus die out, they may have spread to Africa later," she said.

"The split of chimps and humans was a single event. Our data support the view that this split was happening in the eastern Mediterranean — not in Africa."

[Rev.Cambeul]

Two views of a composite reconstruction of the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud (Morocco) based on micro-computed tomographic scans of multiple original fossils. The groundbreaking fossil discovery in Morocco obliterates two decades of scientific consensus that our forefathers emerged in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, according to two studies published in the science journal Nature.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/archaeology/the-obsession-with-a-fossil-that-changed-human-history/news-story/3dea95eda0576aa19e06a8ea2818bd74

[Br.IanVonTurpie]

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/is-australias-stonehenge-near-mullumbimby-where-civilisation-began-or-historical-hoax/news-story/8a0fe799bf3e97d69deb9eb744a36169?nk=aae6beb3938d88f53fe0f222c5e772cb-1496952812


Some people believe "The Australian Stonehenge" they found in Northern NSW was where early humans   Came from.

[Rev.Cambeul]

Tooth fossil found by 5-year-old in Bulgaria could belong to oldest known human

A TOOTH fossil found by 5-year-old has helped spawn a controversial theory about humankind's evolution.

AFP | 17 June 2017

http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/archaeology/tooth-fossil-found-by-5yearold-in-bulgaria-could-belong-to-oldest-known-human/news-story/69d158b6d45b8de12da4b7a31620b299

Extract: The oldest known human ancestor — which most scientists have hitherto believed came from Africa.

A small team of researchers hopes to find proof of human origins in Bulgaria as they gingerly recover fossils from the clay of a dried-up river bed near the sleepy village of Rupkite in the June sunshine.

It all began in 2002 when the five-year-old grandson of local amateur palaeontologist Petar Popdimitrov found what looked like a fossilised tooth with three roots.

"My son-in-law, who is a dentist, said in the evening that it might be human." He might be right, in a way, and the discovery could be nothing short of momentous, potentially proving that humans diverged from apes not in Africa but in the eastern Mediterranean.

In 2007 Mr Popdimitrov showed the tooth to Professor Nikolai Spassov from Bulgaria's National Museum of Natural History and to Denis Geraads from the Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

Now, 10 years on, a team led by Spassov and Madelaine Boehme from Tuebingen University in Germany have put forward the theory that the tooth matches a jawbone found near Athens in 1944.

Conducting new studies on the jawbone, discovered by German soldiers digging a bunker in World War II, and on the tooth and the fauna in the area of Bulgaria where they were found, the researchers have come up with a bold and controversial theory.

They posit that both items are from a creature called Graecopithecus, and that it was a hominin — the collective term for humans and our direct line of non-ape ancestors. Graecopithecus, the researchers hypothesise, migrated to Africa only later.

CHAD COMPETITION

Previously it was assumed that the oldest potential hominin was the Sahelanthropus found in Chad in west Africa in 2001, Mr Spassov said, and thought to be around seven million years old.

"Now we think that it was the Graecopithecus found in Greece and Bulgaria because our two finds are several hundred thousand years older," he said.

The male Graecopithecus weighed around 40 kilos, as much as a female chimpanzee today, with massive and powerful jaws capable of chewing tree bark and chestnuts, Mr Spassov said.

"We can also assume that it walked upright," he added.

"... We are here — to look for whatever part of a skeleton, preferably pelvis, hip, jaw or skull that will enable us to cement our theory and tell much more about our potential first ancestors."

Chronic lack of funding for scientific research and field trips in Bulgaria, the European Union's poorest country, has limited his team's excavations to just eight days this summer.

[Rev.Cambeul]

Gene Study Suggests Homo sapiens Migrated into Africa, Not Out of the Continent – Interbreeding with Local Hominins 150,000 Years Ago

Bruce R. Fenton | Ancient News | 22 July 2017

http://ancientnews.net/2017/07/22/gene-study-suggests-homo-sapiens-migrated-into-africa-not-out-of-the-continent-interbreeding-with-local-hominins-150000-years-ago

A Protein Found in the Saliva Samples of Sub-Saharan Africans Offers Evidence that Strongly Contradicts the 'Out of Africa' Theory for Human Origins. Scientists from the University of Buffalo stumbled on the genetic marker for an unknown African interbreeding event while researching the evolution of an important mucin protein called MUC7.

Sub-Saharan Africa has long been considered the birth place of humanity. The region's Khoisan population is heralded as the oldest known human lineage on Earth, surviving remnants of the population ancestral to all modern humans. The University of Buffalo research program, headed by Omer Gokcumen, Ph.D., assistant professor of biological sciences, and Stefan Ruhl, DDS, Ph.D., a professor of oral biology, has uncovered startling data that potentially displaces Sub-Saharan Africans as being ancestral to all humans.

"Our research traced the evolution of an important mucin protein called MUC7 that is found in saliva," explains Gokcumen. "When we looked at the history of the gene that codes for the protein, we see the signature of archaic admixture in modern day Sub-Saharan African populations."

In recent years gene studies have revealed that the ancestors of modern humans in Asia and Europe interbred with other variants of the human family, among these were Neanderthals and Denisovans. The MUC7 research adds to growing evidence that ancient Africans also encountered and interbred with local hominin populations.

"It seems that interbreeding between different early hominin species is not the exception — it's the norm," says Omer Gokcumen

During the research, the MUC7 genes within more than 2,500 modern human genomes were examined closely. What they found astonished everyone, a group of genomes from Sub-Saharan Africa presented a variant of MUC7 that was extremely different to versions observed in all other modern human populations.

The Sub-Saharan variant of the gene was so far apart in the results that even Neanderthal and Denisovan MUC7 genes were more closely related to those of non-African modern humans. Neanderthals and Denisovans are both non-African human lineages that lived largely in Asia; there is no evidence that they ever lived in Africa.

"Based on our analysis, the most plausible explanation for this extreme variation is archaic introgression — the introduction of genetic material from a 'ghost' species of ancient hominins," Gokcumen says. "This unknown human relative could be a species that has been discovered, such as a subspecies of Homo erectus, or an undiscovered hominin. We call it a 'ghost' species because we don't have the fossils."

The team used known mutation rates (molecular clocks) to calculate when the Sub-Saharan Africans had acquired their variant of the MUC7 protein, the result suggested the interbreeding event was close to 150,000 years ago. The genetic analysis also revealed that the Hominin group responsible had been on a separate evolutionary path for around 1.5 to 2 million years.

Homo erectus populations diverged around 2 million years ago, forming distinct groupings in Africa and Asia, this makes it very likely that the 'ghost population' were, in fact, descendants of African Homo erectus (also known as Homo ergaster). Asian Homo erectus gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as various other now extinct human forms.

What makes the MUC7 research so exciting, and potentially so very controversial, is that the variation in the protein is unique to Africans, despite that fact that the interbreeding event responsible occurred long before the colonizing of Eurasia.

Human origins researcher, Bruce R. Fenton, sees the University of Buffalo study as yet more evidence that the Out of Africa Theory is wrong, a claim central to his recently published book, The Forgotten Exodus: The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution.

"The obvious interpretation of the data in is that a wave of early Homo sapiens migrated out of Southeast Asia and into Africa sometime between 200 – 150 thousand years ago. We have anatomically modern human fossils from this given period already uncovered in China and East Africa. The population that these migrants interbred with is almost certainly African Homo erectus, the dates all fit like a hand in a glove," says Fenton.

If all modern humans arose from Sub-Saharan Africans migrating out of Africa between 70 – 60 thousand years ago, we should see the same MUC7 protein everywhere. The fact that Sub-Saharan Africans have a unique variant strongly suggests that these populations arrived in Africa after diverging from other Homo sapiens populations elsewhere, most likely in Asia.

Fenton also highlights the similarity observed between the saliva protein in non-Africans and other non-African hominins, "The discovery that non-Africans carry an MUC7 genetic signature far more like that of Neanderthals and Denisovans, very unlike Sub-Saharan Africans, strongly suggests a shared Asian genesis for all three human populations. The likely source population for all of these human lineages would be Asian Homo erectus, and the geographic locations associated with their emergence Australasia and Southeast Asia."

The Buffalo University research was published on July 21 in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/molbev/msx206

More: Neanderthals Interbred with Homo sapiens Very Early
http://ancientnews.net/2017/07/19/neanderthals-interbred-with-homo-sapiens-very-early-in-asia

[Mikey]

A good documentary is ICE AGE COLUMBUS. Also, if you can find it, THE MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS OF MAN and THE MYSTERY OF THE SPHINX.

Graham Hancock has more than proven the superiority of the White Race in his books:
The Fingerprints of the Gods
The Message of the Sphinx
The Mars Mystery
The Magicians of the Gods

And don't forget MARCH OF THE TITANS!