CHANGE YOUR CLOCKS
If you’re keeping track of when modern humans arose on planet earth, it’s time to reset your clocks…by about 35,000 years:
A new study concludes that the earliest known humans appeared in southern Ethiopia about 195,000 years ago, about 35,000 years earlier than had previously been thought.
That conclusion is based on what researchers say are the oldest anatomically modern human fossils ever found.
Although leaving the full-fledged arrival of Homo sapiens far from resolved, this development suggests that roughly three-fourths of modern human evolution occurred on the African continent.
This new information dovetails nicely with some genetic studies showing that modern human DNA diverged approximately 200,000 years ago. Evolutionary biologists, using a form of DNA passed down through the ages by females only called “mitochondrial” DNA, determined that the bulk of Homo Sapien evolution occurred in Africa and that humans began to spread out from there about 125,000 years ago.
It’s this kind of confirming evidence that scientists love because the DNA theory of divergence has now been “proven” by the physical evidence of the bones.
This news also deals a crippling blow to an alternate theory of human evolution known as the “Multiregional” theory. In this theory, modern humans evolved in several different places at approximately the same time and replaced more archaic human genera approximately 100,00 years ago. While the mitochondrial DNA evidence disputed this hypothesis, its proponents had pointed to the fossil evidence as being compelling. With the discovery of these older fossils, even the multiregionalists have to conclude that the 200,000 year date for modern human divergence is a blow to their theory.