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Remains from Morocco dated to 315,000 years ago push back our species' origins by 100,000 years — and suggest we didn't evolve only in East Africa.
At an archaeological site near the Atlantic coast, finds of skull, face and jaw bones identified as being from early members of our species have been dated to about 315,000 years ago. That indicates H. sapiens appeared more than 100,000 years earlier than thought: most researchers have placed the origins of our species in East Africa about 200,000 years ago.
The finds, which are published on 7 June in Nature1, 2, do not mean that H. sapiens originated in North Africa. Instead, they suggest that the species' earliest members evolved all across the continent, scientists say.
Genomic evidence
An earlier origin for H. sapiens is further supported by an ancient-DNA study posted to the bioRxiv preprint server on 5 June6. Researchers led by Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University in Sweden sequenced the genome of a boy who lived in South Africa around 2,000 years ago — only the second ancient genome from sub-Saharan Africa to be sequenced. They determined that his ancestors on the H. sapiens lineage split from those of some other present-day African populations more than 260,000 years ago.
We report the discovery of an African American Y chromosome that carries the ancestral state of all SNPs that defined the basal portion of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree. We sequenced ∼240 kb of this chromosome to identify private, derived mutations on this lineage, which we named A00. We then estimated the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the Y tree as 338 thousand years ago (kya) (95% confidence interval = 237–581 kya).
originally posted by: Wildmanimal
a reply to: punkinworks10
Very interesting,
I wonder how this snuck its way
past "peer review" ?
For everything we know, or are told,
I am still stunned by how much we
don't know for sure, and the great magnitude
yet to be discovered.
Thanks for Sharing! S&F
originally posted by: Wildmanimal
a reply to: punkinworks10
Very interesting,
I wonder how this snuck its way
past "peer review" ?
originally posted by: peter vlar
a reply to: punkinworks10
It's definitely an interesting find. It's unfortunate that due to the age of the remains, DNA will be very elusive given current technological constraints. But it's no different than the challenges we faced 20 years ago trying to demonstrate evidence of Pleistocene admixture based solely on post cranial skeletal morphology and a couple of potential juvenile hybrids in Portugal. I have to dig a little deeper into the data, but based on cranial morphology alone, the Morrocan cranium shown in the article has more archaic features than the Omo remains and has far more in common with H. Heidelbergensis than it does with the AMH remains found at Omo Ethiopia.
originally posted by: toysforadults
Anybody who believes anything these charlatans say has their blinders on.
They purposely ignore obviously drawn conclusions to perpetuate the mainstream archaeological narrative even though they know it's wrong.
Dose recovery tests as well as comparisons with standard protocols show the accuracy of the new technique. It is found that the sensitivity of the thermoluminescence (TL) signal of flint in the orange–red waveband does not show severe changes due to the heating process while measuring the TL. This allows the application of a short SAR procedure, which requires only two dose points.
A new thermoluminescence dating method for heated flint (PDF Download Available). Available from: www.researchgate.net... [accessed Jun 8, 2017].
Thermoluminescence dating presupposes a "zeroing" event in the history of the material, either heating (in the case of pottery or lava) or exposure to sunlight (in the case of sediments), that removes the pre-existing trapped electrons. Therefore, at that point the thermoluminescence signal is zero.
As time goes on, the ionizing radiation field around the material causes the trapped electrons to accumulate (Figure 2). In the laboratory, the accumulated radiation dose can be measured, but this by itself is insufficient to determine the time since the zeroing event.
The Radiation Dose Rate - the dose accumulated per year-must be determined first. This is commonly done by measurement of the alpha radioactivity (the uranium and thorium content) and the potassium content (K-40 is a beta and gamma emitter) of the sample material.
Levallois technology is the name for the stone knapping technique used to create tools thousands of years ago. The technique appeared in the archeological record across Eurasia 200 to 300 thousand years ago (ka) and appeared earlier in Africa. Adler et al. challenge the hypothesis that the technique's appearance in Eurasia was the result of the expansion of hominins from Africa. Levallois obsidian artifacts in the southern Caucasus, dated at 335 to 325 ka, are the oldest in Eurasia. This suggests that Levallois technology may have evolved independently in different hominin populations. Stone technology cannot thus be used as a reliable indicator of Paleolithic human population change and expansion.