Out of Africa

Fig.1 The Laetoli footprints 

 These are footprints made by members of the genus Australopithecus Afarensis about 3.5 million years ago. The image is courtesy of Tanzania Tourism

"The implication is that the human genome arose in Africa. Everyone is African, and yet not from any one part of Africa”
Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program 

Introduction

Paleoanthropologists study the evolution of humans using fossils, radiometric dating, genetics  and imaging techniques. There is consensus among paleoanthropologists that today's humans originated in Africa and migrated to the rest of the world. Called the Out of Africa theory, there have been several migrations over the last 2 million years, with the latest migration happening about 70,000 years ago.  This theory postulates that present day humans evolved about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago in the Horn of Africa. About 70,000 to 60,000 years ago, a small group of Homo Sapiens migrated out of Africa to populate the rest of the world.  It is accepted by most anthropologists that every person living outside Africa owes his/her existence to this migration. However this is not the only migration out of East and South Africa. A H.Sapiens skeleton found in Southern Ethiopia has been dated at 210,000 years.  A skull fragment found in a cave called Apidima in the Peloponnese in Greece has been dated to 210,000 years ago marking one of the earliest migration of H.Sapiens from Africa. Another skeleton, with a mixture of modern and archaic features,  has been found in Morocco. This has been dated to 315,000 years ago.  

There have been other migrations in the past by archaic humans such as Homo Erectus. Homo Erectus. which is dated before H.Sapiens, were the first species to migrate out of Africa. H.Sapiens is the latest and only surviving member of the genus Homo. Other species such as  Habilis, Erectus and Neanderthals are now extinct for reasons that are not well known.

Before we proceed forward, we have to go back a bit, actually a few million years, to understand how humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and who were their ancestors

Fig.2 The African origin of present day humans

This image is in the Public domain

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1376-z - Apidima Cave fossils provide earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia

See Also

• What does it mean to be human 

• An evolutionary timeline of Homo Sapiens

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