Posted on 06/25/2008 5:04:06 PM PDT by blam
The Great Human Migration
Why (Modern) humans left their African homeland 80,000 years ago to colonize the world
By Guy Gugliotta
Smithsonian magazine, July 2008
Seventy-seven thousand years ago, a craftsman sat in a cave in a limestone cliff overlooking the rocky coast of what is now the Indian Ocean. It was a beautiful spot, a workshop with a glorious natural picture window, cooled by a sea breeze in summer, warmed by a small fire in winter. The sandy cliff top above was covered with a white-flowering shrub that one distant day would be known as blombos and give this place the name Blombos Cave.
The man picked up a piece of reddish brown stone about three inches long that he—or she, no one knows—had polished. With a stone point, he etched a geometric design in the flat surface—simple crosshatchings framed by two parallel lines with a third line down the middle.
Today the stone offers no clue to its original purpose. It could have been a religious object, an ornament or just an ancient doodle. But to see it is to immediately recognize it as something only a person could have made. Carving the stone was a very human thing to do.
The scratchings on this piece of red ocher mudstone are the oldest known example of an intricate design made by a human being. The ability to create and communicate using such symbols, says Christopher Henshilwood, leader of the team that discovered the stone, is "an unambiguous marker" of modern humans, one of the characteristics that separate us from any other species, living or extinct.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
GGG Ping.
Maybe Africa sucked back then too.
YEC INTREP
Just build the danged fence. We can’t have these Neanderthals migrating up here.
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Thanks Blam. |
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The Scars of Evolution:"The most remarkable aspect of Todaro's discovery emerged when he examined Homo Sapiens for the 'baboon marker'. It was not there... Todaro drew one firm conclusion. 'The ancestors of man did not develop in a geographical area where they would have been in contact with the baboon. I would argue that the data we are presenting imply a non-African origin of man millions of years ago.'"
What Our Bodies Tell Us
About Human Origins
by Elaine MorganThe Neandertal EnigmaFrayer's own reading of the record reveals a number of overlooked traits that clearly and specifically link the Neandertals to the Cro-Magnons. One such trait is the shape of the opening of the nerve canal in the lower jaw, a spot where dentists often give a pain-blocking injection. In many Neandertal, the upper portion of the opening is covered by a broad bony ridge, a curious feature also carried by a significant number of Cro-Magnons. But none of the alleged 'ancestors of us all' fossils from Africa have it, and it is extremely rare in modern people outside Europe." [pp 126-127]
by James Shreeve
There’s a book by John Cohane called “Paradox” wherein he poses an extra-terrestrial origin of man. Not the usual wacko stuff and somewhat interesting. The second unconnected part of the book is most interesting as he used linguistic patterns to determine that there were two major seafaring migrations by man and mapped out the routes using like names for places that only occurred in a narrow path.
One intriguing point he made is that it looked like when these explorers went no further, they repeated the name and there were no more associated place names after that. As in Pago Pago, Walla Walla, etc.
He/she invented tic tac toe - what's the mystery
Wouldn’t the sea level have been somewhat lower then?
Yes, they were. Times were generally colder and dryer then too.
So, this cave may have looked out on a coastal plain.
The Migration History of Humans:
DNA Study Traces Human Origins Across the Continents
Scientific American Magazine
July, 2008
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-migration-history-of-humans
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