Human evolution; leaving Africa (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 15, 2022, 19:22 (707 days ago) @ David Turell

Mediterranean sailing evidence:

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2022-12-15/ty-article/hominins-were-sailing-the-med...

"However, there is growing evidence that several areas that were islands for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years were occupied by hominins, who must have braved the waves to get there. This is now argued to be the case with the Aegean Islands, an archipelago of hundreds of islands between Greece and Turkey, including favorite holiday destinations such as Crete, Mikonos and Santorini.

"Strong evidence of early hominin habitation first emerged about a decade ago when archaeologists on Crete found thousands of flint tools dated to more than 130,000 years ago, and possibly as old as 700,000 years. These artifacts were made in the Acheulean style, a distinctive stone tool industry first developed in Africa by Homo erectus, the first hominin to leave humanity’s evolutionary cradle and spread across Eurasia starting some 1.9 million years ago.

***

"The researchers reconstructed the shoreline of the Aegean Islands and surrounding mainland over the last 450,000 years. This was done by combining data from ancient river deltas, which reveal changes in sea levels, with the known subsidence rate, caused by tectonic plate activity, of the Aegean Islands.

***

"Given that different hominins often used the same stone tool technologies it is difficult to determine who exactly the first colonizers of the Aegean Islands were without finding any human remains. However, the most likely candidates would be Erectus or one of his descendants, such as Homo heidelbergensis, which mostly populated Europe, or Nesher Ramla Homo, a recently proposed Middle Pleistocene inhabitant of modern-day Israel and the Levant.

***

“'Although I fully endorse the hypothesis that sea crossing was not necessarily a Homo sapiens skill and innovation, but that other large-brained Middle Pleistocence species may also have had it, the data offered in the paper do not provide conclusive evidence to that effect,” Galanidou tells Haaretz. She notes that the oldest known Sapiens fossils date to around 300,000 years ago – not too far from the time frame of 450,000 onwards that was the focus of the new study – so we cannot rule out that those first Aegean inhabitants were just early modern humans.

"Ferentinos says his study didn’t go beyond the half a million year mark because we don’t yet have reliable data for how the shorelines of Greece and Turkey looked like before then. However, he and his colleagues are convinced that the evidence for sea voyages by pre-Sapiens hominins in the Aegean is strong and is also indirectly confirmed by the recent discovery of million-year-old prehistoric tools linked to Homo erectus in Spain.

"This is earlier than other Erectus finds in Western and Eastern Europe, suggesting that hominins may have reached the Iberian Peninsula first by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, rather than by travelling by land from the east, Ferentinos says.

“'Traditionally we think Erectus only left Africa through the Sinai Peninsula and then the Levant, but then we have to ask ourselves how they got to Spain before reaching the rest of Europe,” he says. “The most plausible solution is that they crossed at Gibraltar. I think we need to rethink what we know about human dispersal not just in Greece but around the world.'”

Comment: perhaps our early ancestors were master sailors. God did not control their travels.