Regarding the older finds of Sapiens, when we find DNA traces and compare them to modern DNA, we are not able to find any modern population that is descended from any of this Sapien DNA, outside of Africa, that is older than even 25k.
It is well known that Sapiens arrived in Spain 40k years ago and that they demonstrated modern behavior: arts, music, advanced hunting tools, but DNA analysis suggests this group disappeared entirely, no trace of their DNA is found in existing European populations. The picture then is that 75k ago Eurasia was covered with humans, of at least 3 or 4 different species, and all of them died, and then Eurasia was repopulated by a burst of homo sapiens that radiated out from Africa.
Of course, this picture would change if we ever found some old DNA, outside of Africa, that could also be matched to DNA in a surviving group of humans.
How does that comport with modern humans still having some admixture from them?
Modern Humans can be an admixture of several species if the ancestors to modern humans either migrated south to Africa or continued to survive in some place like Arabia, but perhaps we just haven't found the right fossil yet. Assuming Sapiens and Neanderthals mixed together in the Levant then they either survived in the Levant or they moved south into Africa and then later expanded out of Africa.
This is fascinating and new to me, can you provide any articles or podcasts that discuss it?
I thought the news from Morocco was now well known, see here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22114
Homo sapiens and some other form of human were living in the Levant 200,000 years ago:
https://www.earth.com/news/new-type-of-prehistoric-human-fou...
The reference to the skulls found on an island Greece, I'll need time to track that one down.
Very neat, turns a lot of previous evidence on its head.
Anyone to whom this is complete news? How did they manage this all without wheels?
Walking, and at least for the people in North America probably canoes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_modern_humans
This population in Belgium and Spain seems to have died out:
"Earlier EEMH (10 tested in total), on the other hand, did not seem to be ancestral to any present-day population, nor did they form any cohesive group in and of themselves, each representing either completely distinct genetic lineages, admixture between major lineages, or have highly divergent ancestry. Because of these, the study also concluded that, beginning roughly 37,000 years ago, EEMH descended from a single founder population and were reproductively isolated from the rest of the world. The study reported that an Aurignacian individual from Grottes de Goyet, Belgium, has more genetic affinities to the Magdalenian inhabitants of Cueva de El Mirón, Spain, than to more or less contemporaneous Eastern European Gravettians.[15]"
The population in Spain apparently had music, as this flute is dated to 40k years ago:
Hasn’t this been debunked by the discovery of Neanderthal and I think Denisovan DNA in contemporary human populations?
Really hard for early artefacts to survive being under the ocean for 10k years.
Nonetheless, I think its fair to say now that we can at least push back the timeline for early civilized settlements to at least the time of Gobekli Tepe (~10k years).
By the way, this is unrelated to the GP post which was about hominids walking out of Africa, more than 1M years before entering America.
As an aside, the white sands footprints aren't "proof". They're interesting and highly suggestive, but significant concerns remain about the quality of the dating, let alone transbering crossings in the LGM without implicating things like the sketchy refugia hypothesis. It'll be a few years before all that shakes out and we have anything approaching consensus on the matter.
Perhaps there was more pushback in archeology?
Humans didn’t “stay in Africa” and early Homo sapiens certainly didn’t wait until 10k years ago to spread across the planet. Going off memory here but pretty sure the current theory is early Homo sapiens started to spread out of Africa about ~70-60k years ago. 10k years ago is around when agriculture and “civilization” began.
Also other hominids, arguably a kind of human, like Neanderthals and homo erectus had left Africa well before 100k years ago - considering they were probably more adapted to their environment in many cases it’s not that far fetched to think their presence generally made it harder for early Homo sapiens to displace them or coexist with them, given they’d occupy similar ecological niches.
Until diseases spread back and forth enough that Sapiens had enough immunity to non-Sapien diseases, but not vice versa (due to lower population density or less diverse fauna outside Africa) which wiped out the non-Sapiens populations outside Africa.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_human_settleme...
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/out-of-africas-midlife-crisis