Post by cjm on Jun 28, 2015 16:41:48 GMT
www.nature.com/news/europe-s-first-humans-what-scientists-do-and-don-t-know-1.17815?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews
Here, Nature sifts through recent research to explain what we have learned about the first humans to reach Europe — and what scientists still desperately want to know.
The first humans in Europe interbred with Neanderthals
They may have no living descendants
But later waves of humans followed in their footsteps
The first humans' route to Europe is still unclear
It is not clear whether humans and Neanderthals shared culture
We don't know why humans out-competed Neanderthal
...
Here, Nature sifts through recent research to explain what we have learned about the first humans to reach Europe — and what scientists still desperately want to know.
The first humans in Europe interbred with Neanderthals
They may have no living descendants
But later waves of humans followed in their footsteps
“It’s a complex story,” says Hublin. “It’s not a one-way peopling of Europe by modern humans coming out of Africa.” Archaeologists have long hypothesized that Europe was colonized by successive waves of hunter-gatherers, based on clear differences in stone tools and bone and shell ornaments recovered from sites across Europe and the Middle East. “You have an invasion of different groups of hunter-gatherers speaking different languages and carrying different kinds of weapons with them into Europe,” says Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The first humans' route to Europe is still unclear
Some archaeologists propose that humans leaving Africa skirted around the Mediterranean, near present-day Israel, Lebanon and Jordan, and then headed west through present-day Turkey into Europe. Advocates of this 'Levantine corridor' hypothesis note that stone tools and shell ornaments from sites in the Levant are similar to those found in the earliest human sites in Europe. A study published this month5 that dated the human occupation of one Lebanese cave to more than 45,000 years ago — slightly earlier than the European sites — supported the idea that this region served as a launching pad to Europe.
But Higham thinks that a more likely scenario is for humans to have expanded into present-day Russia first, then west. A 45,000-year-old human from western Siberia — whose genome was sequenced by Reich’s team last year2 — could belong to this wave. “I think the jury’s still out,” says Higham.
But Higham thinks that a more likely scenario is for humans to have expanded into present-day Russia first, then west. A 45,000-year-old human from western Siberia — whose genome was sequenced by Reich’s team last year2 — could belong to this wave. “I think the jury’s still out,” says Higham.
It is not clear whether humans and Neanderthals shared culture
We don't know why humans out-competed Neanderthal
...