I return to an issue that I briefly discussed last year: what if the first humans came from Australia, not Africa, contrary to the received “Out-Of-Africa” anthropological hypothesis? Here I will explore this interesting idea further, citing Internet sources.
One article “Out-of-Africa Yesterday, Australia Today and the Pleiades Tomorrow – Part 1,” at http://www.ancient-orgins.net/human-origins-science-opinion-guest-authors/out-africa-yesterday-australia-today-and-pleiades, says that the original molecular geneticists who first coined the “African Eve” name, had “conceded errors in their original research then dismissed Africa and repositioned Australia as the birthplace of Homo Sapiens sapiens.” The article quotes one as saying: “It seems too far out to admit, but while Homo erectus was muddling around the rest of the world, a few erectus had got to Australia and did something dramatically different – not even with stone tools – but it is here that Homo sapiens emerged and evolved.”
In “The Myth of the World’s Oldest Culture,” at http://www.convictcreations.com/aborigines/oldestculture/html, the author notes that there is evidence of multiple races being in Australia:
The fossil record shows that between 10,000 and 50,000 BCE, Australia was populated by humans with thick robust skeletons that were unlike Aboriginal people today. Skeletons dated at 10,000 years ago found at Kow Swamp were almost like Homo erectus (a species of hominin that existed in Asia until 30,000 years ago). From about 10,000 years ago, the fossil record is dominated by the gracile skeletons that were like Mungo Man’s of 62,000 years ago and Aborigines today. Some Anthropologists have explained the diversity of skeletons as adaptions to climatic conditions rather than evidence of multiple human migrations.
It is highly doubtful that thick robust skeletons though were an adaptation to Australian climatic conditions, rather than a legacy of the genetic past.
The article also has some interesting observations to make about ancient rock art:
Just as the fossil record shows evidence of humans on the move, so does the rock art. The oldest rock art, known as the Bradshaws, has been dated at 17,500+ years and the style is spread over 50,000 sq. km of northern Australia. The art is unusual for Palaeolithic art because humans, rather than animals, dominate the subject matter. (Human subjects usually start dominating art in agricultural societies where hierarchical systems of status develop). Aside from the human subjects, the art has some surprise in that seafaring boats are depicted as in a line of deer. (The type of boat depicted is usually carved with metal tools and until European colonisation, deer were never known to exist in Australia.)
In depictions of boats, the end of the boat is almost as high as a person sitting upright. Such a structure requires carving with metal tools; if you think that this can be done with stone, then try it and see how difficult it is. As well, almost all Aboriginal rock art tends to focus on animals and hunting, which is different from the Bradshaws’ conception.
The same site Convictcreations.com, (http://www.convictreations.com/aborigines/prehistory.htm) also discusses Mungo man and the Kow Swamp skeletons. Regarding Mungo man, the material about the mitochondrial DNA may be out of date given recent claims that the original ANU testing was contaminated (I critiqued this last year). Nevertheless, regardless of age issues (Mungo man was originally estimated to be 62,000 years old), Mungo man’s skeleton did not have a thick skull and big brow and was more like modern humans. However, the Kow Swamp skeletons have thick brow ridges, sloping foreheads and extremely large teeth, unlike modern humans. Homo erectus is supposed to have never reached Australia, so if the Kow Swamp skeleton is not Homo erectus, there is a problem of a people who existed 10,000 years ago, being younger than the more modern Mungo people. Again, academics claim that the skeleton shapes were an adaption to the cold, but this is an ad hoc hypothesis with no evidence to support it, for if the region was extremely cold, which it was not, this evolutionary adaption would have applied to all people.
It is more reasonable to suppose that a more “primitive” people proceeded the modern Aboriginal people in Australia, in particular, that Homo erectus may have been in Australia and for vast periods of time. But to further complicate this, there is evidence that “mitochondrial DNA puts the origin of Homo sapiens much further back and indicates that Aboriginal Australians arose 400,000 years ago from two distinct lineages, far earlier than any other racial type.” http://humansarefree.com/2014/the-first-human-race-came-from.html. There are, this article points out, sites much older than the alleged 100,000 years taken to be the origins of Homo sapiens, such as Jinmium tools at 176,000 years, Lake George-fire-stick farming of 120,000 years and Great Barrier reef fire stick farming of 185,000 years, among others. All of this is inconsistent with “African Eve” and conventional archaeology.
There is also mention made in the above article of discoveries of hundreds of human skeletal remains in America that are much like Australian Aborigines. Footprints discovered by Silvia Gonzalez in 2003 in the high desert south-east of Puebla Mexico predated the Clovis (Mongoloids) by at least 10,000 years: R. Adler, “The First Americans,” New Scientist, April 8, 2006, pp. 42-46.
Indeed, the date of some prints was 40,000 years: Quaternary Science Reviews, vol. 25, p. 201. The prints could therefore not have been made by the Clovis as this was during the last Ice Age and the Bering land bridge was impassable. Gonzalez speculates that these people could have looked like Australian Aborigines or south Asians. However, dating by Paul Renne at the University of California, indicates that if the footprints are really footprints rather than erosion marks, they are likely to be around 1.3 million years old, which means that humans are even older than any one has previously contemplated.
Steven Strong, “Homo Sapiens Sapiens Originated in Australia, Not ‘Out-of-Africa’-DNA Evidence,” at http://thestringer.com.au/homo-sapien-sapiens-originated-in-australia-not-out-of-africa-dna-evidence-5938, mentions another complication to this story, that of the Denisovans, an ancient sub-species of humans, genetically closest to the Australian Aborigines. A femur bone found in a cave in Spain, yielded DNA which was Denisovan and 400,000 years old. So an early species of human was wandering Europe well before humans were thought to have evolved on the African Eve model.
Although many of the authors cited here take Aboriginal Australians to be the “original” humans, and this is not impossible, they generally accept that the original humans arose from “two lineages” with no African involvement of mt DNA or Y-chromosomes. The lineages would therefore pre-date modern Aborigines.
As well, it is likely that many earlier humans lived in Australia before modern Aborigines, so that modern Aborigines are not strictly a “first people,” but certainly older than any other living candidates. It is possible that modern humans could therefore have evolved in Australia rather than Africa, so in a sense we are all “aboriginal.” In any case, as Steven Strong says, although there is uncertainty about the identity of the “more ancient common ancestor,” “All that can be stated with confidence is that humanity’s ancestor did not reside in Africa, but “probably” Australia.” The African Eve hypothesis, therefore, is almost certainly wrong.