Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Geology, Palaeontology & Archaeology => Topic started by: Lewis Thomson on 06/01/2022 11:04:04
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Paul wrote into The Naked Scienctists Office with this question,
"Many 1000's of years ago two men die on opposite sides of the world. The skeletal remains found in Africa survive because of environmental features but thee skeletal remains of the 2nd disintegrate and are never found.
An explorer finds the first set of bones and proposes that human life started inn Africa. I admit I don't know where life started and i'm not really fussed, but I wonder if someone could convince me that life did start in Africa. From time to time we are finding skeletal remains of Neanderthals etc, so on behalf of any Neanderthal ancestry I may or may not have, I'd like some convincing. Perhaps I haven't read all the best documentation on these finds."
What do you think? Leave your comments below...
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but I wonder if someone could convince me that life did start in Africa.
That depends, is there some preconceive notion that you have?
The evidence indicates that the evolution of man occurred in Africa.
Here is some basic info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution)
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Skeletons are unlikely to be of any use when looking for the origins of life, because life has existed on this planet for billions of years before skeletons were developed.
If the question is regarding the beginnings of human life, then skeletons are useful. I am no expert in paleontology, but there seem to be many very early hominid skeletons that have been found in Africa, and many fewer in other places. And I don't think it's just an issue of where fossils are most stable, because there are plenty of fossils of non-hominid mammals from the same times found all over the world.
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One of the pieces of evidence I find compelling is that when species spread out, the migrant groups lose genetic diversity.
- The greatest hotspot of human genetic diversity is in Africa.
The various pros and cons are discussed here; the major alternative to Africa is the "multi-regional hypothesis":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans
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IIRC homo sapiens certainly spread from Africa and displaced homo neanderthalensis in Europe and other hominid species elsewhere. It is probable that these species also spread from Africa some millions of years earlier. It is also likely that the appearance of northern Europeans owes something to interbreeding between early modern man and the neanderthals.
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Hardly anyone will find exact data! But it is quite possible to put forward hypotheses!
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Hardly anyone will find exact data! But it is quite possible to put forward hypotheses!
It's quite possible to get good data by dating fossils. Genetics is also useful when looking at patterns of human diversity based on region. Put the two together and you get a good idea of where the first humans were likely to originate from.