USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011107.0559 (On Screen): Anthropology and Archeology continue to grapple with faint clues to our origins. The evidence for our evolutionary origin in southern Africa is now beyond argument; the real question is when we spread out to the world. In that case there seemed to be different and contradictory pieces of evidence. First, traces of relatively primitive hominids are found all over the world going back quite a ways -- perhaps a million years. But if that were the only diaspora, then local evolution would kick in, and modern humans would have become far more diverse than we are.

Part of the problem was that for decades this field was partially blinded by European arrogance and blatant racism, and the degree of diversity in modern humans was exaggerated. But as the scales of racism have fallen from our eyes and as modern genetic analysis has been used to give quantitative measures of the differences between the peoples of the world, it's become apparent that we really are all alike; the differences are minor. Finally it became clear: there had been two diasporas.

There was an early one, which lead to such things as the homo erectus "Java man" and "Peking man" finds. From this developed the Neanderthals in Europe. And among them you do see the kind of local differentiation that such a time period would imply. But quite recently a new breed of humans developed in Africa and again exploded into the world: the CroMagnons. These expanded out and replaced all the other hominids elsewhere, and from them all of us are descended. In every regard, the CroMagnons seem to have been modern, but that trace of European ethnocentricsm has hung on, and there was still an urge to try to believe that somehow even if they were genetically modern, well, at least they were not technologically modern and the european strains of them had somehow developed technologies which hadn't been in Africa.

So this article describes as "surprising" the fact that it's now been demonstrated that the CroMagnons in Africa had been using bone tools (a quite advanced technology compared to wood and stone) at the time of the second exodus. I don't find it surprising at all. Every piece of evidence I've seen says that the people who left Africa the second time were for all intents and purposes modern humans. The only important difference between them and us would be due to nutrition and culture and such unimportant things as skin color. (discuss)