Christopher Stringer: Rethinking "Out Of Africa"

CHRISTOPHER STRINGER: is one of the world's foremost paleoanthropologists.

He is a founder and most powerful advocate of the leading theory concerning our evolution: Recent African Origin or "Out of Africa".

He has worked at The Natural History Museum, London since 1973, collaborating with scientists across all the disciplines of paleoanthropology, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, with over 200 papers and books to his name.

"At the moment, I'm looking again at the whole question of a recent African origin for modern humans—the leading idea over the last 20 years.

This argues that we had a recent African origin, that we came out of Africa, and that we replaced all of the other human forms that were outside of Africa.

But we're having to re-evaluate that now because genetic data suggest that the modern humans who came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago probably interbred with Neanderthals, first of all, and then some of them later on interbred with another group of people called the Denisovans, over in south eastern Asia.

If this is so, then we are not purely of recent African origin. We're mostly of recent African origin, but there was contact with these other so-called species.

We're having to re-evaluate the Out-of-Africa theory, and we're having to re-evaluate the species concepts we apply, because in one view of thinking, species should be self-contained units.

They don't interbreed with other species. However, for me, the whole idea of Neanderthals as a different species is really a recognition of their separate evolutionary history—the fact that we can show that they evolved through time in a particular direction, distinct from modern humans, and they separated maybe 400,000 years ago from our lineage

Morphologically we can distinguish a relatively complete Neanderthal fossil from any recent human.

You could argue that they're an extreme variant of Homo sapiens, but a very different 'race' from anyone alive today, or, as I prefer to argue, they're a separate species, with a separate evolutionary history.

I've never actually said that that meant they were completely reproductively isolated from us. We know that many closely related species in primates, for example, can interbreed.

Various species of monkey can interbreed and have fertile offspring, and so can our closest living relatives, Bonobos and common chimpanzees.

In my view the Neanderthals were closely related and probably potentially able to interbreed with modern humans, but until recently I considered that while there could have been interbreeding forty or fifty thousand years ago, it was on such a small scale that all trace of it vanished in the intervening years.

It now seems from Neanderthal genome studies that that was not so. We do have a bit of Neanderthal in us, you and I, it's a small amount, but certainly not negligible.

Does that mean Neanderthals are a different species or does it mean we should include them in Homo sapiens?

Well, they are still only a small part of our makeup now, reflecting something like a 2.5% input of their DNA. Physically, however, they went extinct about 30,000 years ago.

They had distinct behaviour and they evolved under different conditions from us, so I still think it's useful to keep them as a separate species, even if we remember that that doesn't necessarily preclude interbreeding."

Read more of this fascinating article here at EDGE: Rethinking 'Out of Africa' - Includes a Video and audio transcript.

Alas poor Hobbit......we did not know you well!

Anthropology is comparing this small hobbit skull to that of it's square jawed Homo Sapien cousin and coming to differing views.

The tale of Homo floresiensis, aka 'the hobbit' is beginning to read less like a Tolkien epic and more like an Agatha Christie whodunit.

Two studies have added a new and interesting twist to the plot. One claims that the skeleton's ape-like feet push back its ancestry near the dawn of Homo. Another argues that the hobbit is a later offshoot of Homo erectus, dwarfed by aeons of island isolation, just like the British!

"Either answer is pretty damn exciting," says William Jungers, a palaeoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, who led the analysis of the foot. "It's telling us something pretty amazing about human evolution."

The Hobbit skeleton

Researchers unearthed the hobbit's 18,000-year-old skeleton in Liang Bua Cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. Then in 2004 partial remains from at least a half dozen individuals were uncovered.

Much of the subsequent research has focused on the skull, which encased a 417 cubic-centimetre brain; about the size of a chimpanzee's and a third the size of a human adult brain.

Allegedly, island species, separated from their mainland kin, tend to shrink over evolutionary time, so the main thrust of the "hobbit as a separate species" arguments have focussed on its small brain. However another theory holds that the skull is simply that of a diseased Homo sapiens.