The current idea of the timing of these events within Africa is that ancestors of today’s Khoesan, central African hunter-gatherers, and other groups started to differentiate after 300,000 years ago. These early ancestors may have absorbed genes from archaic African groups. One or more groups may have pushed into Eurasia at this time, spreading similar genes to the Neanderthals.
Wow - very fascinating research
By 40,000 years ago the dispersal and networking of modern human groups was certainly dominated by their strengths, but during their early evolution 250,000 years ago their limitations were still very evident.
Foley and Lahr noted a coincidence of timing of early Levallois assemblages in Europe and Africa starting around 300,000 years ago. Levallois and related methods of stone reduction are known as “prepared core” techniques, because they require the toolmaker to shape the stone core in anticipation of striking one desired flake. The archaeologist Grahame Clark had termed these methods as “Mode 3” technology. The planning required for these techniques seemed to represent an advance over the handaxe-dominated Acheulean (Mode 2) and chopper-based Oldowan (Mode 1) tools that preceded them.
Foley and Lahr proposed that Neanderthals and modern humans both evolved from a Levallois-using common ancestor. Like Reich, they accepted that Neanderthals were aligned with modern humans and different from the “true archaics” in Europe that preceded them.
Denisovans, too, used prepared core techniques, hafted points on spears, used ochre, and made markings. https://stonetoolsmuseum.com/story/hafted-spear-and-dart-points/
Hafted points are stone, bone, or metal spearheads attached to wooden shafts, appearing as early as 500,000 years ago in South Africa.
A foreshaft is a short section of wood, bone, or ivory that fits inside a socket in the end of the main shaft. Various cane species were a popular material for main shafts because they are naturally hollow, allowing for insertion of the solid wood foreshaft. A hunter could carry multiple replacement foreshafts for each main shaft in their hunting kit.
Stone points were mounted into a slot in the end of the foreshaft, usually supplemented with plant resin and/or sinew lashing. Sinew was wrapped on while wet and, when dry, shrank tight around the point and shaft. Many stone points were notched or stemmed to provide purchase for the lashing. Resin was added over the lashing to strengthen the haft and to waterproof the sinew, which will grow loose when exposed to water. Archaeologists experimenting with North American-style notched obsidian points claimed that, aside for used in binding a point to a foreshaft, deep notches served to weaken the point so it would break off inside the prey animal.
Denisovans, too, had Levallois and other material culture similarities with Neanderthals and contemporary African peoples. The Denisovans did not, as far as we can tell, have the same extent of gene flow from African sources.
mtDNA and the Y chromosome, continue to be an extremely important source of information because of their unique pattern of inheritance [7], [8], [9], [10]. As they are uniparentally inherited, they evolve exclusively through the sequential accumulation of mutations along the maternal and paternal lineages, respectively; ....Key findings indicate a complete replacement of earlier Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) with a lineage related to modern humans, as well as distinct social structures based on high female mobility.
In addition to these two uniparental genetic systems, the African gene flow makes up around 6% of the whole genomes of later Neanderthals.
In addition, the Y-chromosome diversity is an order of magnitude lower than the mitochondrial diversity, a pattern that we found is best explained by female migration between communities....Neanderthals may have been patrilocal...This result suggests that female-biased migration was a major factor in the social organization of the Chagyrskaya Neanderthal community.... the absence of Neanderthal DNA on the X chromosome could result from the way these two groups interbred. If most successful pairings involved Neanderthal males and human females, fewer Neanderthal X chromosomes would have entered the long-term human gene pool.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05283-y
I propose an early origin of modern humans in northwest Africa in a temporal window of 257-345 thousand years ago. A first population split in central Africa around 175-288 thousand years ago. A subsequent northward spread with additional population subdivisions during a long statistical interval that culminated in a first successful out of Africa migration around 130 thousand years ago. A population constriction in southwest Asia motivated an early return to Africa between 70 and 100 thousand years ago. This ample Eurasian-ebb to Africa, detected by mitochondrial haplogroup L3 and Y-chromosome haplogroup E preceded other later and geographically more limited Eurasian backflows. The archaeological and fossil finds that could be coetaneous to this molecular journey have been integrated into this interdisciplinary model.
https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/3460
AI:
Neanderthals exhibit uniparental inheritance (mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes) inherited from a single parent, similar to modern humans, but their late-stage lineages show a complete replacement of original Y chromosomes and mtDNA with those from early modern humans. This replacement was likely driven by the lower population size and higher genetic load (deleterious mutations) in Neanderthals compared to modern humans, which meant modern human genes were more beneficial
Paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer suggests
- Potential Intersection: Homo erectus existed in Asia as recently as 117,000–108,000 years ago, placing them in the same region and time frame as early Denisovans.
- Professor Chris Stringer, a leading paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum, has been instrumental in identifying Homo longi (or "Dragon Man"), a potential new human species proposed in 2021. Based on a ~146,000-year-old Chinese skull, Stringer suggests this species is a closer sister group to Homo sapiens.....
- Prof Stringer continued, “Yunxian 2 may help us resolve what’s been called the ‘Muddle in the Middle,’ the confusing array of human fossils from between 1 million and 300,000 years ago. Fossils like Yunxian 2 show just how much we still have to learn about our origins.”
- https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/analysis-of-reconstructed-ancient-skull-pushes-back-our-origins-.html
- https://michaelbalter.substack.com/p/human-evolution-a-new-face-for-the
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Thus he quotes John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, as agreeing that the Harbin skull is a Denisovan, but that they, modern humans, and Neanderthals, “are all Homo sapiens.”
This reflects the views of Hawks, a well-known “multiregionalist,” that modern humans evolved separately in different parts of the world but that interbreeding led to all these family trees coalescing into one species.
On the other hand, Zimmer quotes Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, as saying “Homo longi is the appropriate species name for this group.” Stringer is closely associated with the anti-multiregionalist position sometimes referred to as the Out of Africa hypothesis. In recent years, many scientists have come to think that both views are correct in some ways, especially as evidence for interbreeding between different hominid groups has mounted.
I’ve known Chris Stringer for more than a quarter of a century, so I asked him to comment on all of this. ... "most of the large-brained humans from the last 800,000 years can be sorted into one or other of the following groups/species: Asian erectus, heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, sapiens and Denisovans/longi. There is certainly much more to come from extractions of ancient DNA and proteomes from the human fossils."
The Casablanca fossils come from a time [773,000 years ago] when Homo erectus spread out of Africa. It was also a time when older groups of hominins like the Australopithecus and Paranthropus died out.
In terms of shapes and features, the fossils show a mix of archaic traits typical of Homo erectus and more advanced traits closely related to Homo sapiens. They also fill an important gap in the African fossil record. Palaeogenetic data suggest a split between the African lineage to Homo sapiens and the Eurasian lineages that later produced the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.
The unique combination of primitive and more evolved features suggests that these individuals were in a population that lived close in time to this split.
Sima de los Huesos ("Pit of Bones") is located within the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological complex, situated in the province of Burgos, northern Spain. The site is a deep vertical shaft (approx. 13-14 meters) inside the Cueva Mayor cave system, known for holding the largest collection of 430,000-year-old human fossils...
the fossils of Homo antecessor unearthed at the Gran Dolina site in Atapuerca, Spain were the only ones to show Homo sapiens-like traits. The fossils from the Grotte à Hominidés [Morocco] offer a new perspective.
They open up the possibility of an evolutionary link with the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils – those from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, dated to around 315,000 years ago. These discoveries help clarify the emergence of the Homo sapiens lineage while reinforcing the idea that its deep roots are African.
Originally classified in 1935, H. helmei has since been re-visited by numerous anthropologists, most of whom now believe that the Florisbad skull actually belonged to a very early Homo sapiens individual. However, despite being the same species as us, the morphology of this prehistoric fossil is pretty different from modern human skulls,
Homo helmei(often associated with the ~259,000-year-old Florisbad Skull from South Africa) is an ambiguous, sometimes debated, archaic human classification often considered a late form of Homo heidelbergensis or a very early ancestor of Homo sapiens. It typically bridges the morphological gap between middle Pleistocene hominins and modern humans, characterized by a larger, modern-like braincase...Stringer’s analysis places the 146,000-year-old Harbin cranium (and affiliated 1-million-year-old Yunxian 2 skull) as a sister group to Homo sapiens, suggesting the common ancestor of our lineage lived in Asia...
“Our analysis suggests that all large-brained humans from the last 800,000 years or so can probably be put into one of five groups,” explains Chris. These are the groups of Asian Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, the Homo longi group which likely contains the Denisovans, and of our own species Homo sapiens.
“What’s revolutionary about our analysis is that it suggests all these five lineages trace their ancestry back more than a million years, which is much older than almost everyone has said, including me. And there are a couple of aspects that suggest that it could be an even more ancient divergence.”
What they arrived at was something [a skull 1 million years old in China] which looked less like Homo erectus and more like those of a fossil known as Dragon Man.
The Dragon Man fossil, also unearthed in China, was described by Chris and his colleagues in 2021 and has been named as the species Homo longi.
“Our analysis suggests that the Yunxian skulls are actually an early member of the same group as Dragon Man,” says Chris. “And because Dragon Man increasingly now looks like it’s a Denisovan, there’s a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that the Yunxian fossils also belong to the Denisovan group.” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202
Feng et al. reconstructed the 1-million-year-old Yunxian 2 cranium using an approach that allowed for removal of much of the compression and distortion naturally present in the fossil. In doing so, they found that the cranium contained both primitive and derived traits and concluded that it is representative of the H. longi clade, which is sister to H. sapiens and likely contained the Denisovans.
the Denisovan lineage of humans had already split off from other humans by a million years ago. On the surface this might appear like a fairly minor discovery, but its ramifications could be huge....Therefore, if the Denisovans split off over a million years ago, it means that ours did too and that the Homo sapiens lineage is equally as ancient....
there must be some early members of the lineages of H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens that we haven’t found yet, or which we have found but we haven’t recognised yet. There must be some million-year-old proto-sapiens, proto-neanderthals and proto-heidelbergensis out there.”
It also opens the door for the potential that our own lineage first emerged somewhere in Eurasia, before populations migrated into Africa where Homo sapiens then evolved. Chris, however, is quick to point out that this conclusion still needs checking against million-year-old human fossils unearthed on the African continent that were unavailable for the current study.
@JohannDrittenthalerjohann
9 minutes ago