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Adding on to this: The human ancestors before this single instance were all from Africa. This title picks one particular definition of human and uses that as t
by landon32 9y ago
Adding on to this:
The human ancestors before this single instance were all from Africa. This title picks one particular definition of human and uses that as the basis for its claim. The ancestors of this species were certainly from Africa, and many later human descendants were also from Africa. Africa has much stronger ties to Human kind's birth than Europe does.
Also, it's very possible that this species died out and left no descendants. There are many examples of this at many stages in humanity's histories-- Paranthropus robustus, homo neanderthalensis, and Denisovans. If a common ancestor of Anatomically Modern Homo Sapiens really originated in Europe, we should be finding more evidence soon. Even if we find more evidence of that, we still can't say that Europe is the birthplace of mankind, because so much of Mankind's evolution (Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, etc) took place in Africa.
It's just silly to call Europe the birthplace of mankind.
- mirimir 9y agoMaybe it's silly to say that either Africa or the Mediterranean (or wherever) is "the birthplace of mankind". That is, maybe there was considerable migration and interbreeding throughout the process. We know now that both Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed to the modern human genome. So why not more backcrossing, going back further?
- flukus 9y agoThis is known as the multi-regional hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregional_origin_of_modern_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregional_origin_of_modern...
- Scarblac 9y agoIf many Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA (which is what I've understood), then neanderthalensis hasn't entirely died out without descendants, right?