Alan Thorne: Not Out of Africa (Humans left Africa earlier than believed)

[skunk]

Not Out of Africa (http://discovermagazine.com/2002/aug/featafrica)

The title is a bit misleading.

Alan Thorne proposes that our ancestors (homo erectus) left Africa about 2 million years ago, and evolved elsewhere, rejecting the notion that modern humans evolved in Africa exclusively.

Recent African origin of modern humans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans)

The competing hypothesis is the multiregional origin of modern humans. Some push back the original "out of Africa" migration—in this case, by Homo erectus, not by Homo sapiens—to two million years ago.[2] (http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/johanson.html) [3] (http://discovermagazine.com/2002/aug/featafrica).

Thorne believes in regional continuity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregional_origin_of_modern_humans#Regional_con tinuity), which makes a lot of sense IMO.

The term "multiregional hypothesis" was first coined in the early 1980s by Milford H. Wolpoff and colleagues as an explanation for the apparent similarities seen in Homo erectus and Homo sapiens fossils from the same region, what they called regional continuity.[2] (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/pdf_extract/241/4867/772)

Wolpoff rejected the earlier proposal by Coon of parallel evolution[2] (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/pdf_extract/241/4867/772) and proposed a theory based on clinal variation that would allow for the necessary balance between local selection and a global species. He proposed that Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Homo sapiens and other humans were a single species. This species arose in Africa two million years ago as H. erectus and then spread out over the world, developing adaptations to regional conditions. It was proposed that for periods of time some populations became isolated, developing in a different direction, but through continuous interbreeding, replacement, genetic drift and selection, adaptations that were an advantage anywhere on earth would spread, keeping the development of the species in the same overall direction, while maintaining adaptations to regional factors. Eventually, the more unusual local varieties of the species would have disappeared in favor of modern humans, retaining some regional adaptations, but with many common features.[2] (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/pdf_extract/241/4867/772)

Let's take a look at the definition of the word definition of species (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/species) shall we?

Biology. the major subdivision of a genus or subgenus, regarded as the basic category of biological classification, composed of related individuals that resemble one another, are able to breed among themselves, but are not able to breed with members of another species.

Ah breeding.

So...If one group of animals was able to breed with another, than that would make them the same species correct?

Neanderthals and humans are considered separate "species", yet they probably interbred (and there is ample evidence to back this up).

That makes them the same species, correct?

Cosmos Magazine: Humans and Neanderthals interbred (http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/814/humans-and-neanderthals-interbred)

Live Science: Humans and Neanderthals Might Have Interbred (http://www.livescience.com/health/061030_neanderthal_hybrid.html)

Neanderthal DNA Shows They Rarely Interbred With Us Very Different Humans (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/08/08/neanderthal-dna-shows-they-rarely-interbred-with-us-very-different-humans/)

New York Times: Discovery Suggests Man Is a Bit Neanderthal (http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/25/us/discovery-suggests-man-is-a-bit-neanderthal.html?pagewanted=1)

If humans cohabited with neanderthals, there is a strong chance we also interbreed no?

You know what's even more fascinating?

Humans and chimps may have interbred as well (http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2006/05/interbreeding_h.html).

Plenty of evidence to suggest modern humans interbred with other "less evolved" species.

Homo Erectus And Homo Sapiens Did Little Interbreeding (http://www.unisci.com/stories/20012/0514011.htm)

What's even more interesting is the "new human" find recently (Pam posted a thread on it (http://amkon.net/possible-new-human-ancestor-t25614.html?t=25614)).

Bone May Reveal a New Human Group (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/science/25human.html)

Anyway, back to the main reason for starting this thread.

Mungo Man and Mungo Woman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mungo_Lake_remains).

[Lexion]

We're all IEFIEFIEFIEFIEFIEFs.

[skunk]

This comes from the "not out of africa" link in the OP.

I'm going to make a few posts so the reading is a bit easier.

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.

[skunk]

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.

Does anyone think humans wouldn't try fucking everything in sight?

Please.

We interbred, without a doubt.

[skunk]

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.

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.

Mungo man is not related to ancient Africans...How can that possibly be true?

[skunk]

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."

[skunk]

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."

[skunk]

Additional reading:

Bradshaw Foundation: Not Out of Africa but regional continuity (http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/notafrica.php)

BBC: Fossil challenge to Africa theory (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1108413.stm)

Don's Maps: Mungo Man (http://www.donsmaps.com/mungo.html)

This article says Mungo Man is a lot younger than previously thought, but still very old.

Archaeology.org: A Younger Mungo Man (http://www.archaeology.org/0305/newsbriefs/mungo.html)

National Geographic: Discoveries Breathe New Life into Human Origins Debate (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/01/0111origins.html)

PBS: "IN SEARCH OF HUMAN ORIGINS PART THREE" transcript (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2108hum3.html)

[skunk]

We're all IEFIEFIEFIEFIEFIEFs.

I think you should have read the entire thread before posting such nonsense, actually the OP would have sufficed.

[pack3tg0st]

nice thread skunk!

that's a shitload of info to digest at once lol

but you're right... Humans would mate with a tree if it was socially acceptable.

[skunk]

Haha why do you think it took me 3 days to post this? I made sure to read the article several times (and research background information) so I knew what I was talking about :).

[Bitchkoma]

But this theory doesn't disprove the two-wave theory, does it? First wave of aborigines that look africanish and the second wave that look central-asianish..

[Bitchkoma]

I might have to read again later. it's 6am need to get a bit of sleep.

[anarch]

You're bigot, This may as well come from stormfront. Nazi! Racist!


NAaaaaaaaaaaah I'm just fucking with ya. LOL if cogster were here to read this now I'm sure it would go on for pages and pages....

AWESOME find skunk!

[Pam]

Interesting info there Skunk.

[skunk]

But this theory doesn't disprove the two-wave theory, does it? First wave of aborigines that look africanish and the second wave that look central-asianish..

I don't think it disproves any migration theory really. It would make sense that people continually left Africa as their respective tribes grew to their environment's carrying capacity, conflict, lack of resources, etc.

[skunk]

You're bigot, This may as well come from stormfront. Nazi! Racist!

Yeah yeah. This theory does not disprove the idea that we came from Africa, just at what point we left.

I'd say it makes perfect sense that our ancestors spread out (and left the continent) as soon as they left the trees.

[Bitchkoma]

We do have a wanderlust gene built-into us. We fucking went to the moon (or at least sent probes).

[skunk]

Let's see here. We like to fuck everything in sight, and we like to travel.

I'd say this theory is a done deal.

[egg]

nice thread skunk!

that's a shitload of info to digest at once lol

but you're right... Humans would mate with a tree if it was socially acceptable.

Oh God!!! Has anyone figured out how to do that yet?
Something to look forward to!

[Lexion]

I get wood.

My wife and I fuck.

Ergo....she is mating w/ wood.

[Bitchkoma]

If it gets cut can you see growth rings?

[Alessandra]

LOL

[skunk]

Bump for mojo and other fans of alternative evolutionary theories.

[mojo]

hominids evolved in different places all over the planet imo.

earth many millions of years ago.

http://amkon.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=650&stc=1&d=1270693544

20 million years ago up until about 5 million years ago.

http://amkon.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=651&stc=1&d=1270693697

I'd suggest that at this time with continents still relatively close it would have been more than likely that the predecessors of hominids lived on many of the land masses, not just the land mass that was to become africa.
not to mention the evidence that has been unearthed of late that suggests our ancestors were regulalry plying the seas anywhere up to 700,000 years ago. in which case they had the ability to cross from one land mass to another without the aid of land bridges which out of africa theorists rely upon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/science/16archeo.html?8dpc


Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.
That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.




Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean, which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.
More than 2,000 stone artifacts, including the hand axes, were collected on the southwestern shore of Crete, near the town of Plakias






But archaeologists and experts on early nautical history said the discovery appeared to show that these surprisingly ancient mariners had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They also must have had the cognitive ability to conceive and carry out repeated water crossing over great distances in order to establish sustainable populations producing an abundance of stone artifacts.




and anyone that suggests that thinking/postulating or theorizing that we didnt come out of africa means you are racist is a fucking retard.
there are that many species of hominid, discovered in hundreds of different locations around the world that it seems more logical that we were a much more widespread species than previously thought.

[skunk]

and anyone that suggests that thinking/postulating or theorizing that we didnt come out of africa means you are racist is a fucking retard.

RACIST!


there are that many species of hominid, discovered in hundreds of different locations around the world that it seems more logical that we were a much more widespread species than previously thought.

I would tend to believe this as well, but is there fossil evidence supporting that hypothesis?

[anarch]

On a side not Mojos maps have me thinking about elephants. Asian and African..

If India broke off of Africa shouldn't its evolutionary path diverged something like Australians animals or the animals of Madagascar? You know full of throw backs and dead ends with another recordable micro extinction recorded at the point where india slamed into Asia reintroducing all the plants and animals of its land mass into the ecosystem of Asia?///....

MOre to ponder...

I like to consider geology as a measuring stick to evolution. Know what I mean?

What I'm saying is that if Australia slamed into asia I'd expect their to be many many dead fossilized platypus and wallybee.....

[mojo]

What I'm saying is that if Australia slamed into asia I'd expect their to be many many dead fossilized platypus and wallybee.....

much of the megafauna we know of was only discovered 40 or 50 years ago, some even more recently. it wouldn't surprise me if there are pockets of previously unknown fossilized species yet to be discovered in many different places. who's to say whether or not some of the australian megafauna species won't be discovered in cave systems elsewhere in the world.


Since that day in1969, fossils of almost 100 species have been found, dating back 300,000 years with one third of them now extinct, one third living in other Australian areas and the final third still to be found locally. Some of the extinct creatures have been painstakingly recreated by model makers from the research carried out in the caves. Many of the fossils found are of megafauna; giant kangaroos (Procoptodon goliah) almost nine feet tall; a constricting snake (Wonambi naracoortensis) up to six metres long; the largest marsupial to ever live (Diprotodon australis) weighing two tonnes and a six metres long goanna (Megalania prisca). Other creatures have no modern day equivalents; a marsupial lion (Thylacoleo carniflex) and a hippopotamus like creature, (Zygomaturus trilobus) which shoveled up clumps of grasses with its front incisors.


Read more at Suite101: The Australian Fossil Mammal Site at Naracoorte: The Discovery of Australian Megafauna Fossils (http://paleozoology.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_australian_fossil_mammal_site_at_naracoorte#ix zz0kWSBN6yW) http://paleozoology.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_australian_fossil_mammal_site_at_naracoorte#ix zz0kWSBN6yW (http://paleozoology.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_australian_fossil_mammal_site_at_naracoorte#ix zz0kWSBN6yW)

[boycotteverything]

The oldest human ancestor was found in Germany in 1983. (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/05/19/2009-05-19_missing_link_found_fossil_of_47_millionyearold_ primate_sheds_light_on_.html) It is 47,000,000 years old. All the textbooks are about to be rewritten.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/05/20/alg_fossil_1.jpg