One of the greatest fallacies of modern times is the conceit of “settled science”. Anyone who has followed scientific trends with a clear eye for any length of time should be well aware that science is ever anything but settled.
In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne repeats the then-current science that the continents grew from atolls. Albert Einstein was adamant that the universe existed in a steady state. Just a few decades ago, ocean and atmospheric (i.e., climate) scientists were convinced that we were plunging into a new Ice Age (I distinctly recall a now-famous global warming alarmist forcefully making that very point in a university cafeteria in 1978).
The current “settled science” is that humans “came out of Africa”. As too often happens, scientific fashion has dovetailed with political fashion: “All history is black history” is the gross political misappropriation of the Out Of Africa theory.
But it ain’t necessarily so.
Archaeologists have long thought that Homo erectus, humanity’s first ancestor to spread around the world, evolved in Africa before dispersing throughout Europe and Asia. But evidence of tool-making at the border of Europe and Asia is challenging that assumption.
H. Erectus can be said to be the point at which the Homo genus evolved from man-apes to ape-men. H. Erectus is likely the direct ancestor of modern humans. Until now, they were thought to have evolved in Africa, long before human migrations branched out of the continent.
But this new discovery pushes the evolution of H. Erectus further back in time – and outside Africa.
Reid Ferring, an anthropologist at the University of North Texas in Denton, and his colleagues excavated the Dmanisi site in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. They found stone artefacts — mostly flakes that were dropped as hominins knapped rocks to create tools for butchering animals — lying in sediments almost 1.85 million years old. Until now, anthropologists have thought that H. erectus evolved between 1.78 million and 1.65 million years ago — after the Dmanisi tools would have been made.
Furthermore, the distribution of the 122 artefacts paints a picture of long-term occupation of the area. Instead of all the finds being concentrated in one layer of sediment, which would indicate that hominins visited the site briefly on one occasion, the artefacts are spread through several layers of sediment that span the period between 1.85 million and 1.77 million years ago[…]
The presence of a tool-using population on the edge of Europe so early hints that the northern continent, rather than Africa, may have been the evolutionary birthplace of H. erectus.
It should be cautioned that the evidence from Dmanisi is far from conclusive and the fossils are still a long way from modern humans. Still, the implications are stunning. Instead of humans evolving in Africa and branching out, it may be that humans evolved outside Africa and wandered back later.
Ferring and his colleagues propose that some ancestors of H. erectus might have travelled to Asia and possibly Europe, done a bit of evolving, then wandered back to Africa.
“Remember, it would not have been obvious to the hominins they were leaving Africa. There were no signs saying ‘You are leaving Africa now — come and visit us again!'” says Bernard Wood, an anthropologist at the George Washington University in Washington DC. But Wood admits that it is unclear why the hominins might have made these movements.
Nature
Other scientists suggest a likely hypothesis: the pre-humans were following the perigrinations of their food sources. If, as their tool use suggest, these early humans had adapted to a meat-eating lifestyle, that would have made it so much the easier to simply up stakes and follow the food.
Whatever the truth, the only sure thing is that today’s “settled science” is tomorrow’s outdated fallacy – and trying to hitch political barrows to science is a futile and dangerous pursuit.
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