Not Out of Africa but regional continuity

A challenging idea about Human Evolution by Alan Thorne

Homo sapiens who left Africa 100,000 years ago would have
reached Australia 60,000 years ago

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.

Darwin himself dismissed species as a term that is "arbitrarily
given, for the sake of convenience"

In New York, lan Tattersall, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, 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 offspringóalthough 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."

Re-testing their Mungo Man in rival laboratories

In recent months Thorne and his team have examined every human fossil they could lay their hands on. They're re-testing their Mungo Man work, hoping to confirm the findings and fill in some of the remaining gaps in the fossilised man's mtDNA profile. To satisfy their critics, they are allowing three rival laboratories to analyse Mungo Man extractions. Results will be available by the end of this year.

Regional Continuity is the simpler theory

Thorne 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."

Bradshaw Foundation comments

Dr Alan Thorne's theory of Regional Continuity raises some interesting questions concerning the evolution of Homo sapiens.

1. Most scientists generally accept that 60,000 BP is the time of the first occupation of Australia. If Mungo Man is 60,000 years old this would mean that he is a member of the first people that migrated by boat to Australasia from Asia, across the Wallace Line.

2. The Foundation suggests to Dr Thorne that the mtDNA of the Tasmanian Barrinean skeletons should be tested. The test might show that the Tasmanian Barrinean's mtDNA might match Mungo Man's.

3. The tests mentioned above have been completed and the 60,000 BP date is wrong. The date for the Mungo Man is now established as 42,000 BP.


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