IMG source - ©Susana Santamaria / Atapuerca Foundation
A very interesting discovery in Spain of a 1.4m year old human has recently been published. The Atapuerca region of Spain has been one of the most productive archeological sites in history, with over 1600 human remains of 5 different species spread over more than 1 million years found there.
The most intriguing thing about this particular ancient bone is that it shows a chin. Only H. sapiens have chins. There are a great many shared anatomical features between Sapiens and Neanderthals, Denisovans, Floresiensans, and the many other species in Homo, but the chin is not one of them. No other hominins have chiseled chins.
In 2007 another find dating to 1.2mya showed a chin (I was unaware of it until now), but this 1.4mya bone came from beneath it, and shows a lingering human presence of this yet unnamed species at Atapuerca for over 200k years - and more than a million years before the theorized diaspora out of Africa that seems to be the official and promoted line taken by socially acceptable archeology. While we certainly have a lot of hybridization to reckon in Homo, we aren't one species, and no site shows this better than Atapuerca, where the new find predates H. antecessor by half a million years, H. antecessor itself, pre-Neanderthals, Neanderthals, and H. sapiens all have been found.
It's really weird that the oldest human remains found there have a chin, because, as I pointed out, only H. sapiens have chins. Brain size of these remains is comparable to modern humans and Neanderthals. Previously the oldest Sapien remains I was a aware of were from the Levant, some teeth that remain somewhat contested, from ~400kya. I would have never suspected the chin had evolved so long ago, and given that no other hominins have chins, it seems extremely unlikely to be a parallel evolution in a species that did not lead to Sapiens.
Therefore the implication of this find is that H. sapiens were out of Africa more than a million years ago, and arose in Europe, or, as I have long considered because of our hybrid nature, evolved across the entire landscape as species from Africa to Java, from Siberia to Europe interacted and interbred. I consider the evidence of Mitochondrial Eve to be a relic of the Toba eruption that almost wiped humanity out ~75kya, and this is why our mitochondrial DNA seems to have come from one African woman ~70kya.
Given H. sapiens chins in Spain over a million years ago, it is not a diaspora out of Africa that has suddenly occurred only ~70kya, but a cataclysm that has left the many European and Asian maternal lines of mitochondrial DNA without surviving issue today, giving the appearance of recent diaspora because of the chance survival of that mitochondrial line to modern times. Eve may have left Africa, but she entered a previously populated Europe and Asia, rather than being a pioneer boldly going where no Sapien had gone before.
Something to think about is that the chin from Atapuerca predates any from Africa. Eve had a chin, we can be sure, and as far as we can tell chins are found first in Spain, and therefore must have migrated into Africa in order for Eve to have left Africa with a chin ~70kya.
All of the impetus behind the Out of Africa theory seems to be completely unscientific at this point, as the science clearly points to Europe as the primate playground that spawned Homo, sometime after Graecopithecus freybergi lived in the Balkans more than 7mya, more than twice as old as Lucy the Australopithecine from Africa. Now we have a singular and diagnostic Sapiens feature more than 4 times older than any found in Africa, from Spain.
One of the things I find interesting about archaeology is that there seems to be a great deal of pressure for political reasons to support the African genesis of Homo, and also to deny the great antiquity of the megalithic structures that are of identical - and yet unknown today - construction methods, from Peru to India, Egypt to Russia. As a rebel born, I am happy to see scientific evidence refute propaganda in archaeology today.
