In my previous post, I discussed the evidence and arguments that led to the widespread acceptance of the “Recent Out-of-Africa” theory of human origins. Anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries defined the scope of the questions about our ancestry – Where did we originate? How long have we existed as a species? – and began to answer them using fossil evidence. However, …
Decoding the Stories of our Ancestors – Pt. 1
Main picture: Frontispiece to Huxley’s “Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature” (1863). From Wikimedia Ever since a skeleton from the Neander Valley was recognized as an extinct relative of humans in 1856, people have been captivated by the mysterious history of migration, murder, and mating by which Homo sapiens conquered the world. For a long time, a few scattered fossils and …