02.02.2022, 14:24
Zitat:Archaeologyhttps://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/arch...1.10584884
Archaeologists Discover Missing Link in Human Evolution, in Israel
A hominin died in Jordan Valley 1.5 million years ago – and isn’t the same species as the hominins who reached central Asia 1.8 million years ago. Israeli archaeologists prove there were multiple exits from Africa, and by more than one human species. [...]
About 1.5 million years ago, a child died near the Sea of Galilee. All that remains of the youngster is a single bone, a vertebra. But that skeletal fragment, first unearthed in 1966 and only now recognized for what it actually is – the earliest large-bodied hominin found in the Levant – changes the story of human evolution.
Among other things, that one bone proves for the first time that there were multiple exits by archaic humans from Africa. At 1.5 million years of age, the bone is the second-oldest hominin fossil to be found outside Africa. The oldest date to 1.8 million years ago and were found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and that difference of about 300,000 years proves in and of itself that there was more than one exit. [...]
It is believed that the Homo line (culminating in us) split from the Pan line (culminating in the chimpanzee) 7 million to 6 million years ago. Until recently it was thought that after the split, human evolution was linear.
It was not. We now realize there were multiple types of hominins, some living contemporaneously with one another and, as of 2 million years ago at least, roaming out of Africa. The oldest hominin fossils found to date outside Africa are just over 1.8 million years old, in Dmanisi; and now we have this individual from 1.5 million years ago in Israel. So, first of all, clearly there was more than one hominin migration out of Africa. There could have been dozens, there could have been constant creep, in both directions – we simply don’t know. The fossil evidence of our prehistory is incredibly sparse and stone tools can only tell us so much.
Schneemann