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Not Out of Africa but regional continuity A challenging idea about Human Evolution by Alan Thorne
Regional Continuity
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. 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 Man
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, and arms tucked between its legs in a normal sleeping position. 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.
1968 specimen age dated at 30,000
Thorne's colleagues took their best guess at this specimen's age, as they had with Mungo Lady in 1968, based on radio-carbon dating and analysis of stratigraphy. They dated him to 30,000 years ago. As the oldest humans ever found in Australia, the finds were considered so important that the government declared the sandy, bone-dry crater that was once Lake Mungo a national park in order to protect the site.
When had they arrived in Australia?
To Thorne's 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.
Were they from Java and China?
From childhood Thorne had grown up on a continent that was home to one of Earth's oldest continuous cultures. From where he stood, the ways of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were not so different from those of modem 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.
Neanderthals are a European problem
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 a big problem, namely Neanderthals. Thorne's opponents say that Cro-Magnons humans identical to us who lived during the Ice Age simply replaced Neanderthals with no intermingling. Thorne believes that intermingling did take place.
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