Posted on 10/11/2008 10:56:58 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Chinese paleontologists discovered the two incisors in 1965 and the relatively simple stone tools in 1973 in the Yuanmou Basin... and might be from the species Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of humans that may have been the first human to spread beyond Africa about 1.8 million years ago. Scientists have gotten mixed results for the age of the site because there were no volcanic crystals in the soils for reliable radiometric dating. Lacking solid dates, researchers thought until a decade ago that the earliest humans didn't reach Asia until 1 million years ago. But a series of dates for fossils from one site in Java, Indonesia, in particular, have recently shown that Homo erectus was there 1.66 million years ago and possibly earlier... The new team traced that sediment layer--or time horizon--throughout the basin, collecting 318 rock samples from it. In an article in press in the Journal of Human Evolution, the researchers report that the fossils came from a layer of rock just above a magnetic landmark known as the Olduvai-Matuyama reversal boundary, which is at least 1.77 million years old. This makes the fossil site slightly younger, about 1.7 million years old... The finds are a bit younger than the oldest Homo erectus fossils from western Asia, which are 1.77 million years old and come from Georgia, and a bit older than the most conservative dates for the Java remains and 1.66-million-year-old stone tools from northeast China. Taken together, these dates from at least three fossil sites are convincing many researchers that early humans were moving rapidly across Asia 1.77 million to 1.66 million years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenow.sciencemag.org ...
Southern exodus. A trail of stone tools and fossil bones suggests that early humans left Africa 1.8 million years ago. Some headed north to Dmanisi, Georgia; others may have taken a southern route into China and Java, Indonesia. [Credit: NASA/TerraMetrics/Human Origins Program, Smithsonian]
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 Morgan
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