Out with African Eve By Brian Simpson
The African Eve hypothesis is widely accepted in anthropology, holding that humans arose in mother Africa, then migrated to the rest of the globe. The evolution of human races was relatively recent, so race differences are regarded as not significant. This fits very well with the diverse multicultural societies produced by mass immigration today. But, the entire foundation of this depends upon the Out of Africa hypothesis being true.
Now, human-like fossilised footprints have been found on the Greek Island of Crete, which have been dated to be around 6.05 million years old, far older than any other fossils.The tracks are 2.5milion years older the "Lucy" fossils which kicked off the African Eve idea. The researchers believe that the origins of humanity may be in the Mediterranean rather than Africa. Of course, there is a competing multi-regional view that sees no one origin point at all. All these positions will undermine the woke African Eve hypothesis.
"The oldest known human-like footprints may be even older than previously believed, reports Jacinta Bowler for Science Alert. New research suggests the controversial fossilized imprints, found on the Greek island of Crete in 2002, are around 6.05 million years old.
Originally dated to 5.7 million years ago, the 50 footprints might predate this estimate—proposed by scholars in 2017—by more than 300,000 years, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Believed to be left by hominins, the footprints could upend scientists' understanding of how early humans evolved, moving the group's starting point from Africa to the Mediterranean Sea, reports Ruth Schuster for Haaretz. Researchers say it's possible the bipedal creature who made the marks was a member of Graecopithecus freyberg, an early human ancestor discovered in 1944 and nicknamed "El Graeco."
"The tracks are almost 2.5 million years older than the tracks attributed to Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) from Laetoli in Tanzania," says study co-author Uwe Kirscher, an expert on paleogeography at the University of Tübingen, in a statement.
Writing for the Conversation in 2017, Matthew Robert Bennett, an environmental scientist and geographer at Bournemouth University, and Per Ahlberg, an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University, said, "The footprints are small tracks made by someone walking upright on two legs."
The pair, who co-authored both the 2017 study and the new paper, added that the impressions "have a shape and form very similar to human tracks," including five toes without claws, a parallel big toe and a ball of the foot.
Non-human ape footprints look very different," the authors wrote. "[T]he foot is shaped more like a human hand, with the big toe attached low on the side of the sole and sticking out sideways."
Some scientists are skeptical of the study's claims, doubting that the Graecopithecus freyberg species even existed. Israel Hershkovitz, a biological anthropologist at Tel Aviv University who was not involved in the research, speculates that the footprints were actually left by a late European ape.
"All we have from Europe is a group of pre-human apes," he tells Haaretz. "They are interesting and attest to much more favorable climatic conditions [during the late Miocene], but I don't think they are directly or indirectly associated with human evolution."
Speaking with Amalyah Hart of Cosmos magazine, Julien Louys, a paleontologist at Griffith University who wasn't involved in the study, adds, "Some of the footprints look like a bipedal animal, but a lot of the other footprints are very ambiguous and variable in size. Some of them don't look like footprints at all. So, the issue here is making a very large claim on the basis of information that's quite open to interpretation."
The new study acknowledges this dissent. As the authors write, "[Our] interpretation has been controversial, and several counter-interpretations have been made.""
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