When do we leave Africa? (pub. December 6, 2024)
I'm still not speeding up, but increasing the distances of my runs, meandering as I run.
When do we leave Africa?
Obviously, I am referring to humans, I have never been to Africa. All the evidence shows that that is where we come from, the first humans, understood as human being a great ape that walks upright and makes stone tools, appeared there.
Virtually everywhere we look we find that humans expanded out of Africa with Homo erectus a million years ago and were already in Indonesia by 700,000 years ago. This species, based on the time it lived, was the most successful human, a little less than two million years.
But haven't we gone out before that?
There are very interesting remains, about 1.8 million years old, humans of approximately 1.5 meters, apparently the first human hunters. With similarities to earlier humans, such as H. habilis, but also to H. erectus, from the neck down they were already human, for some time they were assigned as a new species, H. georgicus, currently they are considered archaic H. erectus. They would be the first forms of this species.
All of the above is very interesting, but it gets more interesting: these remains are not from Africa, they are from Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia, in the Middle East. This implies that humans began to leave Africa much earlier than previously thought.
But it could be that archaic humans reached much further than Georgia.
Just about 20 years ago, on an island in Indonesia, Flores Island, the remains of little men one meter tall were found. They were assigned the species name of H. florensensis, but everyone knows them as hobbits since in addition to being small, they had big feet. Their remains are about 50 thousand years old, they were good toolmakers, these tools date from about 95 thousand to 13 thousand years ago. The predominant idea is that they are descendants of H. erectus, but due to a process known as insular dwarfism, their sizes decreased.
But there may be another explanation. Studies were done comparing the differences and similarities of hobbit skulls with those of other humans, archaic and modern. The skull most similar to that of hobbits is that of H. habilis, so hobbits are likely descendants of some archaic human who reached Indonesia.
But, after finding the remains of the Hobbits in Flores, remains of other humans, a new species, were found in the Philippines. H. luzonensis, 1.2 m tall, walked upright, but their feet resembled those of archaic humans, and they apparently could spend a lot of time in the trees. So it looks like we have another little man descended from some archaic human who made it to the Philippines.
Since humans have been humans, we have been “pata de perro” (doglegs), as we would say here in Sonora.
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