new illuminati: out of africa

Showing posts with label out of africa. Show all posts

Wednesday, 8 June 2016

The First Race: Out-of-Australia, Not Africa

The artist: Giovanni Caselli has done much of his work in depicting ancient times. He is a lecturer on palaeoanthropology as well as an artist. More of his work: www.giovannicaselli.com (link is external)

by Steve Strong

The First Nations peoples of the Great Southern continent now called Australia were not ignorant savages stagnating in their primitive inadequacies and laziness, as the British invaders have been maintaining and indeed teaching for the past 230 years. Archaeologist's findings together with scientific analogy is now pointing towards the history of these people as the beginning of what is known as 'modern man' in this region, at least.

Professor Clive Gamble (Southampton University) succinctly summarised the current impasse and polarisation this has caused, when declaring we have to construct "a completely new map of the world and how we peopled it."¹ Granted, our response to Gambles call may seem radical, however, these discoveries, found not only in America but throughout the entire Indo-Pacific Region, all point to the same ancient southern inspiration.

After extensive consultation and research, we are of the opinion that at some time in the distant past, no less than 50,000 years ago and possibly much earlier, Aboriginal men and women set sail from Australia and began exploring foreign lands. They were the bearers of new insights and options, and bequeathed humanity the cornerstones of civilisation: religion, culture, gender equality, art, sailing, democracy, astronomy, surgery, and their genes.

Australian Aboriginal guardians of traditional Lore and Law have made it clear to us that they are indeed the "First Race."² They were not, as assumed by some of the general public, ignorant savages stagnating in their primitive inertia. As highly respected Dhungutti Elder Rueben Kelly states, "Centuries ago you white people chose the path of science and technology. That path will destroy the planet. Our role is to protect the planet. We are hoping you will discover that before it’s too late."³

Unlike others out in the field or laboratory, we’ve discovered nothing: our role is to act as scribes and faithfully present their history. The rest is easy: find white-fella proof to substantiate black-fella truth.

'Out of Africa' questioned by one of the leading proponent of the theory

Christopher Stringer is one of the world's foremost paleoanthropologists. He is a founder and most powerful advocate of the leading theory concerning the evolution of modern man: Recent African Origin or 'Out of Africa.' He now calls the theory into question: 'I'm thinking a lot about species concepts as applied to humans, about the "Out of Africa" model, and also looking back into Africa itself.

I think the idea that modern humans originated in Africa is still a sound concept. Behaviorally and physically, we began our story there, but I've come around to thinking that it wasn't a simple origin. Twenty years ago, I would have argued that our species evolved in one place, maybe in East Africa or South Africa.

There was a period of time in just one place where a small population of humans became modern, physically and behaviourally. Isolated and perhaps stressed by climate change, this drove a rapid and punctuational origin for our species.

Now I don't think it was that simple, either within or outside of Africa.'"

Stringer studied anthropology at University College London, and holds a PhD in Anatomical Science, and a DSc in Anatomical Science both from Bristol University.

Source: https://goo.gl/NZ9OyX (link is external)

Questioning Out-of-Africa

Before setting off on this ancient journey there is one destination and exodus that needs to be repositioned: Africa. According to academics and archaeological texts, Africa is the place from where modern humans evolved then spread their genes throughout the continents. The Out-of-Africa theory has over the years, since first proposed, transformed into fact. One of the original papers laying claim to charting our ancient ancestors movements and origin, The Recent African Genesis of Humans, written by Professors Alan Wilson and Rebecca Cann, is acknowledged as the closing chapter in this mystery. However, amongst the absolutes was one qualifier that has been conveniently and repeatedly overlooked. Wisely, with the benefit of hindsight, the authors stated Homo sapiens "probably,"⁴ never definitely, evolved in Africa.

Wilson and Cann proposed all modern humans shared the same ancient mother, who they named Eve, and according to their calculations she lived in Africa at sometime between 150-200,000 years ago. Of crucial importance are two of the three assumptions that underpin their mathematics.

The aboriginal (sic) populations of New Guinea and Australia are estimated to have been founded less than 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. The amount of evolution that has since occurred in each of those places seems about one third of that shown by the whole human species. Accordingly, we can infer that Eve lived three times 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, or roughly 150,000 to 180,000 years ago.⁵

This declaration was regarded as the final word, and the resolution of "15 years of disagreement"⁶ between two branches of science. Wilson and Cann triumphantly proclaimed victory on behalf of the molecular geneticists declaring that "we won the argument, when the palaeontologists admitted we had been right and they had been wrong."⁷

With the case closed and bragging rights secured in perpetuity, science had once again provided certainty and an African ancestry. Or so it seemed. But not long after their paper was published Rebecca Cann realised they were mistaken. In 1982 she examined the mitochondrial DNA of 112 Indigenous people, including twelve full-descent Aboriginals, and the results were in total opposition to what they assumed was fully resolved.

Nevertheless, Cann was obliged to contradict a central tenet of their paper, stating that "mitochondrial DNA puts the origin of Homo sapiens much further back and indicates that the Australian Aboriginals arose 400,000 years ago from two distinct lineages, far earlier than any other racial type."⁸ Not only was the emergence of Aboriginal Homo sapiens "far earlier"⁹ than any Africans, she provided a sequence and motherland.

The Australian racial group has a much higher number of mutations than any other racial group, which suggests that the Australians split off from a common ancestor about 400,000 years ago. By the same theory, the Mongoloid originated about 100,000 years ago, and the Negroid and Caucasian groups about 40,000 years ago.¹⁰

The realignment and reversals were of immediate concern to Alan Wilson. If Cann was correct in detecting a "much higher number of mutations"¹¹ they may as well tear up their original paper.

Desperate to resolve the obvious inconsistencies, Wilson made two visits to Australia. In 1987, Wilson sampled the mtDNA of 21 full-descent Australian Aboriginals and provided 15 different strands. This number was well outside what anyone expected and compelled Wilson to unconvincingly conclude there were more than 15 pregnant females on the first boat. A second visit in 1989 increased the crew size to levels that quite literally sank the boat as it entered the water, and forced Wilson to abandon Africa as the place where Homo sapiens originated. From a second sampling of ten, a similar percentage (70%) of mutation was present. Upon receiving the results of his second mtDNA sampling Wilson immediately conceded the Out-of-Africa theory was wrong.

The math wasn’t complicated: the agreed rate of mtDNA mutation for every new strand is 3,500 years, therefore 22 x 3,500 = 77,000 years. Wilson realised if he returned and increased the population surveyed, so too would the crew-size increase. He was left with no other option but to dismiss their original paper.

It seems too far out to admit, but while Homo erectus was muddling along in 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 there that Homo sapiens have emerged and evolved ... Homo sapiens would have evolved free from competition out of a small band of Homo erectus 400,000 years ago.¹²

Sadly, and somewhat puzzlingly, these findings were mostly ignored. In fact, opposition to the Out-of-Africa theory lost momentum. Perhaps this timid climate goes some way towards explaining the reactions to Alan Thornes research into the genetics and antiquity of Lake Mungo Man (WLH3). Re-dated to be over 60,000 years old and the oldest Homo sapiens yet found, this in itself raises serious doubts relating to the credentials of any theory claiming the first mariners reached the northern parts of Australia 60,000 years ago. Thousands of kilometres from any potential point of entry, the practicalities involved in reaching this distant in-land lake within days after disembarking are insurmountable. This date, coupled with the discovery that WLH3 had an "extinct DNA"¹³ which does not resemble any other population, surely calls into question the reality of an African migration.

Referring back to Wilson and Cann’s original calculations, their proposed timing of somewhere between 50-60,000 years stands on no less shaky ground than their genetic miscalculation. There are at least ten Australian sites claimed to be older than 60,000 years, granted every date is challenged by conservative critics, but even so, all are the products of respected academics.

What needs to be accepted is that if just one date proves to be correct, irrespective of whatever judgment is passed on the other nine, it can be confidently declared as a fact that Australia was not settled by African Homo sapiens 60,000 years ago. Whether the winning site turns out to be Lake George-fire-stick farming (120,000 years); Lake Eyre-skullcap (135,000 years); Jinmium-tools (176,000 years); Panaramittee-rock-engraving of saltwater crocodile (75,000 years); Rottnest Island-tools (70,000 years); Devonport-rock-engravings (>115,000 years); Jinmium-art (75-116,000 years); Great Barrier Reef-fire-stick farming (185,000 years); Lake Mungo (WLH3)-complete skeleton (61-65,000 years); or (WLH1)-cremated bones (61,000 years); one out of the ten is sufficient to deny African entry.

Dating has put the age of the Mungo Man remains at between 56,000 and 68,000 years

Mungo Man was discovered at Lake Mungo in far west NSW in 1974. The skeleton had been covered in red ochre during a burial ritual with the hands interlocked and positioned over the penis. These remains were found in same area as cremated remains of female skeleton known by local Aborigines as Mungo Lady

Recent lab studies of this type have suggested that our most recent common ancestor lived less than 200,000 years ago in Africa.

Australian researchers now say that the DNA sequences isolated from Mungo Man's bones show him to have a genetic lineage that is both older and distinct from the African line.

Given the undoubted modern appearance of Mungo Man, they argue, major doubt must now be cast on the so-called "Out of Africa" hypothesis in which all living people are said to be descended from a group of modern humans who left their African homeland no earlier than about 120,000 years ago.

The First Americans

Compounding the inconsistencies of the Out-of-Africa theory is the recent discoveries of "hundreds of skeletal remains"¹⁴ in America that "look like Australian Aborigines."¹⁵

In the October/November edition of Cosmos, Jacqui Hayes presented a compelling morphological case in support of Australian Aboriginal presence in America. According to Hayes, Aboriginal settlement of the Americas began at an indeterminate time before the second migration of people "with distinctive Mongoloid features"¹⁶ and left, within her by-line, a series of unresolved questions.

When stating that "startling new finds suggest Australia’s first people made it all the way to South America more than 11,000 years ago,"¹⁷ the narrative is incomplete. How far back did these Aboriginal settlements span, and were other locations settled? If indeed Hayes is right in that Australian Aboriginal people were in America, any date obtained beyond 11,000 years must be due to the actions of people bearing Australian Aboriginal genes.

The impossibility of any African migration, genes or antigens entering America, was confirmed through the examination of Aboriginal bones establishing the presence of distinctive antigens.

Arnaiz-Vilena and his team looked at the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system, which is a group of proteins on the surface of human immune cells. The HLAs are what the doctors test for to determine whether one person’s tissues are compatible for organ or bone transplants. HLA is a nuclear marker giving an even genealogy and genetic history for both sexes. The best test showing that HLA is a good genetic marker for studying population relatedness is that it usually correlates with geography.¹⁸

As expected, the first nominee was Australian, but just as importantly the comparative results bore witness to one notable omission: it seems the Africans forgot to sign on.

"So what did they find? Unique signatures only found in Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, and peoples in Asia and even in Europe."¹⁹ Missing in action and mention, the non-appearance of African HLA is yet another inconvenient piece of evidence that bears an Australian imprint.

When recalibrating this Australian Aboriginal/American time-line, dates just exceeding the maximum Clovis (Mongoloid) entry date are certainly inconvenient, but not demanding of tearing out pages. Corroborating evidence of Aboriginal presence during the 10,000 years before the second migration from Asian began can be found at Tlapacoya, 21,700-25,000 B.P., Los Toldos Cave, Patagonia, 14-15,000 B.P., "Meadowbank Rockshelter 19,000 B.P. (southwest Pennsylvania), Tibito 14,400 B.P. (Columbia), Walker 15,000 B.P. (Minnesota) and Mud Lake 13,450 B.P. (Wisconsin)."²⁰

But it doesn’t stop there. Professor Silvia Gonzales, who is a leading advocate of the Out-of-Australia theory, was quite staggered²¹ by the dates obtained when analysing footprints found in a layer of volcanic ash at Lake Vasequillo (Mexico). "A variety of prints (human and animal) captured in this layer of rock were dated using O.S.L."²² She found, much to her understandable surprise, that 40,000 years marked the "last time that these sediments were lit by the suns rays or the last time that the material was heated."²³ Gonzales is adamant these are Australian Aboriginal footprints, and that they reached America by boat through means of "island hopping"²⁴ around the Pacific Basin.

Such a date, 40,000 years, pushes the boundaries and affirms an extensive Aboriginal tenure, and does not stand alone. The corroborative timing at Albert Goodyears site, accentuated by the considerable distance between locations, cannot be a coincidence.

Goodyear had been working at an archaeological site on the Savannah river, near Topper. It was agreed all the available evidence from the Clovis site had been gathered and their work was complete ... He kept digging for another four metres before an assortment of stone tools, along with a hearth, were unearthed. A small piece of charcoal was then analysed by counting the residual Carbon 14 and a date of no less than 37,000 years was deemed appropriate.²⁵

Uncomfortable as these dates are in relation to when ancient Australian Aboriginals first came to America, it gets worse for any clinging to traditional theories.

Not far from the Lake Vasequillo footprints Gonzales investigated is another site that was deliberately ignored for close to 30 years after a comprehensive investigation conducted by Cynthia Irwin-Williams. The dates are so sensational and numerous, and so obviously associated with objects made by Homo sapiens artists, the archaeologists downed tools and clipboards and vowed never to return. The dates returned by a variety of sound geological analyses were far too ancient, not only for occupation, but well outside the assumed period when Homo sapiens first appeared. To some extent the issue isnt just a matter of whether these numbers are feasible, but more a case of open antagonism between two competing branches of science.

Christopher Hardaker, author of The First American, created a fictional conversation between the two competing parties that graphically highlights how the argument over which group of academics is right has blinded the combatants.

ARCHAEOLOGIST: You are asking us to believe that the sophisticated art and technology of the Upper Palaeolithic was actually invented over 200,000 years ago in Central Mexico by Homo erectus? Ridiculous. GEOLOGIST: You are asking us to believe that Science is off by a magnitude of 10? Ridiculous.²⁶

Often the result of cutting-edge technology, the chemicals analysed and computations made came from extremely reputable institutions and individuals. Some of the offending techniques and dates (which came from the layer of volcanic ash and debris deposited above the artefacts/or footprints) include: Uranium Series Dating (200,000 years); Zircon Fission Track (170-640,000 years); mineral solutions (200,000 years); Diatom analysis (80,000 years); U-Th/He (200,000 years); tephrahydration (250,000 years); magnetic shifts in rocks (790,000 years); and argon argon (1,300,000 years).

The facts, and large figures, demand a response. What if just one date is actually right? Does that mean Homo sapiens were, as Christopher Hardaker claims, responsible for "600,000 year old art?"²⁷ If so, does this alone suggest the often sniggered at talk of Mu, Atlantis and other ancient civilisations has real geological substance?

As to whether Gonzales "island hopping"²⁸ route from Australia, up through Asia, Japan, Siberia then America is plausible, it is often said a picture can act as a worthy substitute for quite a few words. The photograph (see page 27) of the Japanese full-descent Ainu Elder was taken in the late 19^th century by German anthropologist Dr. Hermann Klaatsch. The physical characteristics displayed in this photograph, in association with the recent discovery of "a very well-preserved skeleton from Gua Gunung, Malaysia,"²⁹ resonates to one ancient southern inspiration. The Malaysian "specimen is aged 10,200 B.P. and is said to be a late representative of a non-specialised morphology, similar to Australian Aborigines."³⁰

The First Boat

For the appearance of a population "similar to Australian"³¹ Aboriginals in Malaysia, Japan, America, or any other place, a boat is needed. The oft-proposed settlement of Australia from Africa by ramshackle raft, or through desperately clinging on to driftwood during storms, doesnt measure up. This vessel must be able to withstand monsoons and weeks at sea, and accommodate a crew of close to 20 adults to negate in-breeding thus successfully repopulate an uninhabited continent. Nowhere today is anyone going to discover the actual ancient wooden remains of such an ancient sophisticated "ocean-going"³² vessel. But if seeking out everything else bar the planks there is only one place to look.

Graham Walsh was "the widely recognised authority on the intriguing Bradshaw art of the Kimberley area ... Within this area, he has discovered the oldest paintings of boats in the world, dated at a minimum age of 17,000 years, but with the strong possibility of being up to 50,000 years old ... "³³ Walsh insisted that the "high prow of the boat"³⁴ is "unnecessary for boats used in calm, inland waters. The design suggests it was used on the open ocean."³⁵ Walsh was quite shocked by the function, antiquity, and most importantly dimensions of these vessels: "they are massive boats, totally alien."³⁶ Moreover not only was the sophistication and technology exhibited difficult for Walsh to assimilate, he still had to account for the reasons why there were "two paintings of ocean-going boats, one with 23 people on board, the other 29."³⁷

These are ideal numbers as foundation populations when sailing towards distant lands, however diagrams and specifications do not make a boat. To have a clever idea is a promising first step, but there are some practicalities to be addressed before any idea takes form. There are materials, tools, and navigation skills required which supposedly did not exist for at least another 20,000 years. Irrespective of what is assumed, the first tool needed to build a ship that can comfortably cater for 30 people, is an axe. Wood in its prime, not the rotting logs that fall, is essential in manufacturing a vessel strong enough to sail across oceans.

It should come as no surprise that the oldest axe in the world, dated at 40,000 years, was found at Huon Terrace PNG (which was part of the Australian mainland until 8,000 years ago), others discovered in Jaowyn land, Northern Territory (35,500 years), at Sandy Creek, Queensland (32,000 years) and Malangangerr Northern Territory (23,000), are all at least 8,000 years older than the first axe found outside Australia (Niah Cave, Sarawak, 15,000 years).

With axe at hand, plans on the wall, and overseas bookings made, there still remains one vital navigational skill any journey beyond landfall demands. Hugh Cairns book Dark Sparklers is the first and only publication dedicated to the sharing of traditional Aboriginal astronomical knowledge. Cairns won the trust of Wardaman Elder Bill Harnley, who spoke of his ancestral knowledge of the stars, "great black shapes,"³⁸ the movements and constellations in between, and of up "on top."³⁹ According to Cairns, there have been Aboriginal astronomers for "over 30,000 years."⁴⁰

Not only the Pacific, but the Indian Ocean, was a path used to navigate then share so many esoteric gifts, technologies, guidelines, and of course, genes.

"Dr. Raghavendra Rao and researchers from the Indian-backed Anthropological Survey of India project found unique mutations were shared between modern-day Indians and Aborigines."⁴¹ They "identified seven people from central Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic tribes who shared genetic traits only found in Aborigines."⁴²

Much earlier linguistic studies of the Dravidian language had already identified the same relationship. Dravidian "fishermen of the Madras coast use almost the same words for I, thou, he, we, and you as some Aboriginal tribes. Many other key words in the Dravidian dialects are identical in Tasmanian Aboriginal terms both in pronunciation and meaning."⁴³

It needs to be appreciated that Tasmanian culture and language is a relatively recent event, and the island is the outcome of the final thawing at the end of the last Ice Age when the seas covered the low plains between Victoria and Tasmania. Over the last 8,000 years this isolation has been instrumental in the development of a distinctive Tasmanian culture.⁴⁴

With a language that came into existence no earlier than 8,000 years ago forming a substantial part of the basic Dravidian vocabulary, this mtDNA connection strongly suggests the Australian Aboriginals kept in contact with India for some considerable time.

Especially since "Australian canoes are constructed identically to those of the coastal Dravidian tribes of India, and wild tribes in the Deccan region of India are the only culture known to use the boomerang outside Australia."⁴⁵ The oldest boomerang discovered in the world was found at Wyrie Swamp, South Australia, and is dated at 10,200 years.

The dingo, accepted to have been brought into Australia from somewhere in Asia about 6,000 years ago, only strengthens the possibility of an extended Australo-Indian link. It would appear that the Dravidians adopted the Australian boomerang to hunt with, chose their better designed canoes to assist in fishing, and as is often the case when two cultures first meet, shared technology, friendship and genes.

There is so much more to this ancient Aboriginal narrative. At best we have provided a brief geographical overview of where ancient Aboriginal people sailed, and hopefully presented evidence validating their belief that they are descendents of the "First Race."⁴⁶

Whether the African strand of Homo sapiens emerged 40,000 years ago is of no account, our focus is on the much earlier Australian genes, journeys and heritage. We have examined a few of the locations reached, but as for the religious legacy of the Dreaming as evidenced through the nine shared mystical principles, underpinned by equality of gender and species, that is yet another chapter of an ancient story that spans eons and geography. Their intimate awareness of the divine, along with the lesser gifts of sailing, astronomy, brain surgery, penicillin, burial/cremation/embalming, amputations, axe-making, democracy, bows and arrows, and so much more, is part of a forgotten origin that deserves to be heard once more.

Footnotes

1. "Australias First Americans," Daily Telegraph, 8 September 2004, 3 (n).
2. The Nephew of Reuben Kelly, 2010, Recounting Uncle Rueben Kelly From his Nephew, Personal Communication to Steven Strong.
3. Anne Wilson Schaef, Native Wisdom for White Minds: Daily Reflections Inspired by the Native Peoples of the World (Random House, 1995).
4. Allan C. Wilson & Rebecca L. Cann, "The Recent African Genesis of Humans: Genetic Studies Reveal That an African Woman of 200,000 Years Ago Was Our Common Ancestor," Scientific American 266, no. 4. (April 1992), 68.
5. Ibid. 72.
6. Ibid. 68.
7. Ibid. 68.
8. Robert Lawlor, Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime (Inner Traditions International, 1991), 26.
9. Ibid. 26
10. Ibid. 26.
11. Ibid. 26.
12. Ibid. 26.
13. Leigh Dayton, "DNA Clue to Mans Origin: How Mungo Man Has Shaken the Human Family Tree," The Australian, 9 January 2001, 1(n).
14. Jacqui Hayes, "Ancient Odyssey," Cosmos issue 35, 2010, 42.
15. Ibid. 39.
16. Ibid. 40.
17. Ibid. Front Cover.
18. Ibid. 45.
19. Ibid. 45.
20. Steven Strong & Evan Strong, Constructing a New World Map, 1st ed. (University Press of America Inc., 2008), 42.
21. Martin Redfern (producer/reporter), Pauline Newman (producer) & Robyn Williams (presenter), "Oldest American Footprints" (transcript), The Science Show, ABC Radio National, 11 Feb. 2006, http://abc.net.au/rn/sciencesshow/stories/2006/1564746.htm (link is external)
22. Strong & Strong, Constructing a New World Map, 48.
23. Redfern, Newman & Williams, The Science Show.
24. Ibid.
25. Strong & Strong, Constructing a New World Map, 49.
26. Christopher Hardaker, The First American: The Suppressed Story of the People Who Discovered the New World (New Page Books, 2007), 187.
27. Ibid. 45.
28. Redfern, Newman & Williams, The Science Show.
29. Walter A. Neves & Mark Hubbe, "Cranial Morphology of Early Americans from Lagoa Santa, Brazil: Implicatons for the Settlement of the New World," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102, no. 51 (2005), www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1317934 (link is external), 467.
30. Ibid. 467.
31. Ibid. 467.
32. Michael Winkler, "Rock Star of the Kimberley," The Age, 20 Sept. 2004.
33. Strong & Strong, Constructing a New World Map, 47.
34. "First Americans Were Australian," BBC News, 26 Aug. 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/430944.stm. (link is external)
35. Ibid.
36. Winkler, "Rock Star of the Kimberley."
37. Ibid.
38. Hugh Cairns & Bill Yidumbuma, Dark Sparklers, 2nd ed. (H.C. Cairnes, 2004),
39. Ibid. 39.
40. Ibid. 42.
41. AAP, "First Australians Were Indian: Research," Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July 2009(n); Within Steven Strong & Evan Strong, Forgotten Origin (University Press of America, Inc., 2010), 16.
42. AAP, "First Australians Were Indian: Research"; Within Strong & Strong, Forgotten Origin, 16.
43. Lawlor, Voices of the First Day, 120.
44. Strong & Strong, Forgotten Origin, 17.
45. Lawlor, Voices of the First Day, 120-121.
46. Kelly

From Sovereign Union @ . http://nationalunitygovernment.org/content/first-race-out-australia-not-africa-0

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Tuesday, 26 May 2015

Not Out of Africa: Alan Thorne's challenging ideas about human evolution

Not Out of Africa

Alan Thorne's challenging ideas about human evolution

By Joseph D'Agnese, Sean Dungan

Anthropologist Alan Thorne holds casts of two of the skulls that have fueled a controversy about how and when early man reached Australia. The delicate skull at right, of a hominid known as Mungo Man, predates the larger, thicker skull on the left by tens of thousands of years, a reversal of expectations that has challenged traditional theories of evolution.

She came to him in 1968, inside a small, cheap suitcase — her burned and shattered bones embedded in six blocks of calcified sand. The field researchers who dug her up in a parched no-man's-land in southeastern Australia suspected that she was tens of thousands of years old. He was 28. Almost every day for the next six months, he painstakingly freed her remains from the sand with a dental drill, prizing out more than 600 bone chips, each no larger than a thumbnail. He washed them carefully with acetic acid, sealed them with a preservative, and pieced them together into a recognizable skeleton.

Looking closely at skull fragments, bits of arm bone, and a hint of pelvis, he became convinced that two things were true. First, the bones were human, Homo sapiens for sure, and they had held together a young woman. As he assembled this "monster three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle," Alan Thorne, then a lecturer in the department of anatomy at the University of Sydney, began asking himself whose bones they might actually have been. He had no idea that many years later, the answer to that question would rock the world of anthropology.

Something else about this woman became clear early on— she had been important and powerful. The pattern of burn marks on her bones showed that after she died, her family burned the corpse, then smashed the bones. Later, they added more fuel and burned the bones a second time. This was an unusual ritual. Ancient Aboriginal women were typically buried without fuss. Thorne wondered if her descendants had tried to ensure that she did not return to haunt them; similar cremation rituals are still practiced by some Aboriginal groups today. As hours and days and months passed, he found himself thinking of her as a living, breathing person who'd spent her life encamped on the shores of Lake Mungo, in New South Wales. If this Mungo Lady turned out to be as ancient as field researchers thought, she would be the oldest human fossil ever found in Australia. To Thorne she was already the most mysterious.

In 1968 most anthropologists thought they had a grip on human evolution: Big-browed, thick-skulled humanoids had descended from walking apes. These hulking creatures were eventually replaced by the more advanced, fine-boned humans of our species— Homo sapiens. Throughout Australia, anthropologists had found only big-browed, thick-skulled fossils. That made Mungo Lady a puzzle. Lab analysis of her remains suggested she was 25,000 years old— old enough to be a grandmother to those specimens— but her skull bones were as delicate as an emu's eggshell. Thorne began to realize that she might be telling him a different story than the one he'd read in textbooks— that the delicate, fine-boned people had reached Australia before the big-brows.

That was an exotic thought, and now, many years later, it is fueling the debate within anthropology over a single huge question: Where did Homo sapiens come from? Most researchers accept a theory referred to as "out of Africa." It holds that numerous species of hominids— beginning with Homo erectus— began migrating out of Africa almost 2 million years ago and evolved into several species. Then a new species called Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and migrated between 100,000 and 120,000 years ago to Europe, Asia, and Australia, consigning all the earlier hominids it encountered to extinction.

Thorne preaches a revolutionary view called regional continuity. He believes that the species his opponents insist on calling Homo erectus was in fact Homo sapiens, and that they migrated out of Africa almost 2 million years ago and dispersed throughout Europe and Asia. As he sees it, there was no later migration and replacement: "Only one species of human has ever left Africa, and that is us."

Why does this matter? Because if Thorne and his camp are right, much of what we think we know about human evolution is wrong. In the world according to Thorne, the human family tree is not divided into discrete species such as Homo erectus, Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis. They are all Homo sapiens. Yes, Thorne agrees, from the outside all these hominids look different from each other, but so do humans today— a Korean, a Nigerian, and a Dane hardly resemble each other. Our ancestors displayed great variety, but they were similar in the only way that mattered: They were the same species, which meant they could have sex with each other and produce fertile offspring.

Mungo Lady started Thorne down the road to regional continuity. Six years after he reassembled her, Thorne and three assistants unearthed another small-boned skeleton only 1,600 feet from where she had been found. At burial, this body had been laid on its right side, knees bent, arms tucked between its legs. Certain features— the skull, the shape of the pelvis, and the length of the long bones— told Thorne he was looking at Mungo Man, which thrilled him. As a general rule, female skeletons are more delicate than male ones, so doubts about the uniqueness of Mungo Lady's delicate bones would be quashed by having an equally delicate male counterpart to study.

Thorne's colleagues took their best guess at this specimen's age, as they had with Mungo Lady in 1968, based on radiocarbon dating and analysis of stratigraphy. They dated him to 30,000 years ago. As the oldest humans ever found down under, the finds were considered so important that the Australian government declared the sandy, bone-dry crater that was once Lake Mungo a national park in order to honor— and protect— the site. To the Aboriginal tribes, the pair became precious symbols of their early peopling of the continent.

But Thorne assigned a meaning to the bones that resonated beyond Australia. To his mind, the presence of two such unusual skeletons suggested that the peopling of the Pacific was a richer, more complex process than anyone had ever imagined. Anthropologists had long assumed that the first Homo sapiens to reach Australia were fishermen who left Indonesia and got blown off course, ending up on the new continent. Thorne began to wonder whether the first journey from Indonesia to Australia was not an accident but an adventure, undertaken with confidence by intelligent, mobile people. Mungo Lady and Mungo Man closely resembled skeletons of people living in China at the same time. Had these people migrated in boats to Australia? Had there been successive waves of immigration by different peoples over tens of thousands of years? To imagine such things, Thorne had to abandon familiar notions of early man as a blundering primitive.

He had already begun to do so. In the months he'd spent piecing together those braincases, he had begun to think of them as his elders, worthy of respect, capable of thought and imagination. That supposition was not an outrageous one for an Australian anthropologist to make. From childhood Thorne had grown up on a continent that was home to one of Earth's oldest continuous cultures. He'd learned a great deal about Aboriginal culture while working his way through college as a reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald. From where he stood, the ways of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were not so different from those of modern Aborigines. He could easily picture two different tribes settling near Lake Mungo, one from nearby Java, another perhaps with roots in China. And once the two parties were encamped around the lake, it was not hard to imagine them crossbreeding.

Those who believe in regional continuity tend to have a view of sexuality that is more generous and more inclusive than that of the out-of-Africa proponents. In the latter view, Homo sapiens led a kind of search-and-replace mission as they spread around the planet; these researchers believe that members of the new species would not have been able to successfully reproduce with members of earlier species, no matter how hard they tried. Thorne thinks that's nonsense. "European scientists have dominated this field for 150 years," he says. "And they've got a big problem in Europe. Namely, they've got to account for those Neanderthals. My opponents would say that Cro-Magnons"— humans identical to us who lived during the Ice Age— "simply 'replaced' Neanderthals with no intermingling. That's the part I object to. 'No intermingling.' Now, I ask you, does that sound like the human beings you know?"

In the early 1970s, these ideas were pure speculation. Thorne had no proof of anything. The bones had told him what they could and then lapsed into silence. So he tucked them away and went on with his career. Three decades later, the bones spoke again.

Dueling Theories

Graphic by Matt Zang

In 1997 Thorne finally got the tool he needed to explore Mungo Lady and Mungo Man further. European scientists reported that they had successfully extracted fragments of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the remains of Neanderthal skeletons unearthed in Germany, Croatia, and Russia. This was stunning science; the Neanderthals had died out 35,000 years ago, and yet researchers had been able to harvest genetic matter from their bones as if they'd expired yesterday.

It was the beginning of a revolution in paleoanthropology. Geneticists were hooking up with bone men everywhere. They were focusing on mtDNA because the mitochondria, which lie outside the nucleus, are easier to study— in a human cell there are only 37 mitochondrial genes compared with 100,000 genes found in the nucleus— and because it is the only DNA anyone has been able to isolate and interpret in ancient fossils. For reasons not yet understood, mtDNA survives the ravages of time better than nuclear DNA. And it has another interesting attribute: It's inherited only through the maternal line. Scientists seized upon this characteristic to try to build genetic family trees. Almost two years ago, geneticists working in Sweden and Germany reported studying the mtDNA of 53 living people from around the world. Within this small sample, they found that Africans shared a characteristic sequence of mtDNA, and that everyone else carried at least some portion of that sequence in their cells. The research suggests that all living humans had their roots in Africa. But Thorne doesn't put much stock in this report. He thinks the conclusions are questionable because samples taken in Africa today could be from people whose ancestors were not African.

When the first Neanderthal studies were published in 1997, Thorne had already retired. He had traveled the world for 30 years, excavating sites and filming science documentaries for Australian television. His face and his ideas were as well known in Australia as Carl Sagan's once were in the United States. At the request of the Aboriginal council, Thorne still safeguarded the Mungo fossils. Because three more-sophisticated dating technologies were now available, he ordered new tests on 13 of the individuals in his care, and the results gave him a shock.

Skeletal Puzzle: Near the site where Mungo Man's skeleton was excavated, Alan Thorne demonstrates the strange pose in which the body was buried 60,000 years ago.

Center: In his right hand, Thorne holds a cast of Mungo Lady's charred skull; in his left hand, a cast of Mungo Man's skull.

Last: This bone chip is similar in size to the 350-odd chips from which Thorne pieced together Mungo Lady's skull. "Every day I'd sit down and I'd find 10 or so pieces that fit together. I could only work on her 50 minutes at a time, when my mind was fresh. Any longer and they all started to look alike. She took me six months."

The ages came back first. Using the new technologies, his team found that the small-boned Mungo Lady and Mungo Man were actually 60,000 years old— twice as old as anyone had guessed. Thorne saw these dates as a crushing blow to the out-of-Africa theorists. No matter what his opponents said, there wasn't enough time on their 120,000-year clock for Homo sapiens to leave Africa, dash up to China, evolve from rugged Africans into small-framed Asians, invent boats, sail to Australia, march to the interior, get sick, and die. How much simpler everyone's life would be, he thought, if anthropologists could agree that some of the players in this drama had reached China 1.5 million years ago and continued to evolve there.

After the dating, Gregory Adcock, a doctoral student in genetics at Australian National University, decided to check all 13 fossils for mtDNA. But first he set up stringent procedures. It's easy to contaminate specimens: More than once, scientists have been embarrassed when the "ancient DNA" they extracted turned out to be their own. To avoid this catastrophe, Adcock alone handled the specimens. He alone traveled between two testing labs. He sampled his own DNA and Thorne's to use as a control. Before sampling the ancient specimens, he tested five modern human and animal bones to make sure he'd perfected handling techniques. Then he drilled into each fossil and took a sample from the bone's interior, where no one could ever have touched it. Of more than 60 samples he analyzed, he reported only three contaminations. Ten of the 13 yielded DNA.

The results were nothing less than remarkable: Among the 10 successful extractions was the world's oldest known human DNA— plucked from none other than Mungo Man. (No DNA was recovered from Mungo Lady, perhaps because she had been cremated.) Mungo Man also appeared to mock the findings of previous scientists: His mtDNA signature did not match anyone's, living or fossil, on Earth. There was no evidence that he was genetically related to ancient Africans.

The findings were published in January 2001 by Adcock, Thorne, and five other researchers. What followed was intense disagreement. "People just fell over when they read this new stuff," says Alan Mann, an anthropologist at Princeton University and a moderate in the human-origins debate. "The people at Mungo were totally modern looking and were expected to carry the DNA we have, but they didn't. I think that makes for an incredibly complicated story. It's a stunning development."

Thorne's critics were underwhelmed. "Alan is great at generating media interest. He's a former journalist, you know," says Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, a staunch advocate of the out-of-Africa model who is accustomed to his phone ringing off the hook every time Thorne fires another volley. "He has done some important work. I'm not saying his work is bad or wrong or whatever. Obviously, I have a different interpretation of it."

Stringer and his colleagues laid into Thorne. First, they said it was unlikely that 10 of the 13 skeletons had yielded mtDNA. This was an unprecedented success rate, so they believed that there had to be contamination. Even researchers at Oxford University, in one of the world's finest labs, had contaminated specimens. Then they said that mtDNA lines died out all the time; the Australians were making much ado about nothing. This part was true: Twenty-five to 30 percent of mankind's mtDNA has been lost over the past million years when women gave birth to boys or didn't reproduce at all.

Thorne concedes that mtDNA has evolved greatly over time, and all scientists working in this area have to be cautious. But as long as everyone is using mtDNA analysis as a basis for speculation, he asks why his work is regarded with such suspicion. Mungo Man and his alternative complement of genes were alive enough to make it to Australia and contribute to the peopling of a continent. Modern Aborigines didn't inherit Mungo Man's mtDNA, but they have certainly inherited the characteristics of his skull. "Eventually, all these people intermingled, and that's why the Aborigines have such diversity," he says.

Stringer, for his part, maintains that the out-of-Africa model could account for a settlement in southern Australia 60,000 years ago. Africans, he says, would have had to travel only one mile toward Australia each year for 10,000 years to make that possible. In other words, the Homo sapiens who left Africa 100,000 years ago would have reached Indonesia with plenty of time to sail to Australia.

In New York, Ian Tattersall, one of Thorne's closest friends, has long quibbled with his stance. "We've agreed to disagree," says Tattersall, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. "I have a lot of respect for him; I just think he's barking up the wrong tree." Tattersall argues that Neanderthals were so obviously a separate species that Homo sapiens could not have bred with them.

Thorne says his lifelong study of animals has taught him otherwise. In captivity, for example, jaguars have mated with leopards and pumas and produced fertile female offspring— although all three animals supposedly belong to different species. Polar bears and brown bears, wolves and coyotes, dromedaries and Bactrian camels also cross-mate. Darwin himself dismissed species as a term that is "arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience."

In recent months Thorne and his team have examined every human fossil from Australia and Asia they could get their hands on. They're retesting their Mungo Man work, hoping to confirm the findings and fill in some of the remaining gaps in the fossilized man's mtDNA profile. To satisfy their critics, they are allowing three rival labs to analyze Mungo Man extractions. Results will be available by the end of this year. When they are, they will most likely be debated. This science is still too inchoate for either side to declare victory.

Whatever the outcome, the bones from Lake Mungo have created change in Australia. The nation has committed to returning Lake Mungo and its environs to the Aborigines. Soon elders of the tribes living around Lake Mungo will decide when they will assume management of the land, artifacts, wildlife, and tourist trade. In 1991, standing near the metal stake that marks the spot where Mungo Lady was found, Thorne returned her bones to the elders of those tribes. At the time, elders debated whether to rebury her or preserve her. Thorne argued for the latter. "If you do away with her bones," he told them, "I'll always be right. You won't be able to refute my work. Someday there will be an aboriginal Alan Thorne, and he'll have a different way of looking at these bones. You have to give him that chance." The council voted for preservation. Today Mungo Lady inhabits a safe that can be opened only with a key, of which two copies exist. Aboriginal elders hold one; Thorne was presented with the other.

Despite Thorne's proselytizing, only a small fraction of the world's anthropologists accept his theories. But he couldn't care less. These days, he draws inspiration from the old Sherlock Holmes maxim: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

He points out that regional continuity is by far the simpler theory and can much more comfortably account for all the complicated twists and turns in the genetic evidence of human evolution now coming to light. "It argues that what is going on today is what has been going on for 2 million years, that the processes we see today are what have been going on in human populations for a very long time. You don't need a new species that has to extinguish all the other populations in the world. This is why out-of-Africa is the impossible, and regional continuity is not only not improbable but the answer and the truth."

From Discover Magazine @ http://discovermagazine.com/2002/aug/featafrica

For more information about human origins see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/out%20of%20Africa%20debunked