Presentation for my Archaeology graduate class at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

1. AFRICAN EXODUS
Anthro 212 Presentation
Jessie G. Varquez, Jr.
10 December 2011
CSSP, UP Diliman

2. Popular beliefs
• Evolution is linear
• Humans evolved from monkeys
– “galing ang tao sa unggoy”
• The Missing Link

4. Key Questions
• Who are the first hominids that dispersed to
various parts of the Old World?
• What are the physiological and behavorial
characteristics of premodern humans?
• Where did the transition (from premodern to
modern humans) take place?

5. Outline
• Pleistocene or the Ice Age
• Homo erectus
– Acheulian stone tools
• The Neandertals
– Mousterian stone tools
• Modern Humans
– Origin and dispersal

6. Pleistocene or The Ice Age
• Began about 1.8 million years ago
• marked by periodic continental glaciations
• Characterized by numerous advances and
retreats of ice, with at least 15 major and 50
minor glacial advances documented in Europe
alone
• Archaic and modern humans evolved during a
long period of constant climate transition
between warmer and colder in northern latitudes

7. Changing Pleistocene environments in Africa

8. A new kind of hominid
HOMO ERECTUS

9. Pithecantropus erectus
The name first
proposed by Ernst
Haeckel for the oldest
hominid; Eugene
Dubois later used this
name for his first fossil
discovery (1891),
which later became
known as Homo
erectus.

10. Major Homo erectus sites

11. Homo erectus
• Fossil finds in Africa, Europe and Asia
• Some researchers see several anatomical
differences between African representatives of an
erectuslike hominid and their Asian cousins. Thus,
they place the African fossils into a separate
species, Homo ergaster
• Increase in body size and robustness, changes in
limb proportions, and greater encephalization all
indicate that these hominids were more like
modern humans in their adaptive pattern than
theirAfrican ancestors were

12. Homo erectus in Asia
Composite cranium of
"Peking Man" found in
Zhoukoudian cave in
early 1920s (670,000–
410,000 ya)
The Sangiran 17 fossil
found in Indonesia. Note
Crania found in Dmanisi, the long cranium, low
Republic of Georgia in forehead, and large
1999 (1.7 mya) browridges (1.6 mya)

13. H. habilis vs.
H. erectus
BODY SIZE
• Adults weighed well over 100
pounds, with an average adult
height of about 5 feet 6 inches
• Sexually dimorphic
BRAIN SIZE
• Shows considerable brain
enlargement, with a cranial
capacity of about 700* to 1,250
cm3
CRANIAL SHAPE
• thick cranial bone, large
browridges above the eyes, and
a sagittal ridge

14. The technology of Homo erectus
Acheulian site in Kenya showing the
stone tools, with the handaxes in
the middle.
Small tools of the Acheulian
industry. (a) Side scraper. (b)
Point. (c) End scraper. (d) Burin.

15. Acheulian Complex
• The culture associated with H. erectus, including
handaxes and other types of stone tools; more
refined than the earlier Oldowan tools; bifacial
stone tools
• Basic H. erectus all purpose lithic tool kit for more
than a million years
• a kind of “Acheulian Swiss army knife,” these
tools served to cut, scrape, pound, and dig
• Lead to meat diet through hunting; explains
morphological features

16. “Homo habilis Using Volcanic-Cobble Debitage to Rend a Carcass,” © 1995 by Jay H. Matternes.
This artist’s reconstruction shows how early Homo, including Homo habilis and Homo
erectus, likely processed animals in groups, using a variety of stone tools.

17. Homo erectus:
Beginning
Globalization

18. Premodern humans
of the Late Pleistocene
THE NEANDERTALS

19. Fossil
discoveries of
Neandertal

20. Neandertals
• First found in Neander Valley near Düsseldorf,
Germany in 1856
• fossil remains have been found at dates
approaching 130,000 ya
• The majority of fossils have been found in
Europe (France, Croatia and Germany) where
they’ve been most studied, but fossil sites are
also found in Asia (Israel and Iraq)

21. Neandertals?
• They fit into the general scheme of human
evolution, and yet they’re misfits.
• Many anthropologists classify Neandertals
within H. sapiens, but as a distinctive
subspecies, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis,
with modern H. sapiens designated as Homo
sapiens sapiens

22. Modern Human Relatives?
Some of the morphological traits associated with Neandertals can be found in
modern humans, as illustrated by this photograph of the physical
anthropologist Milford Wolpoff facing the reconstructed head of a European
Neandertal. Might Neandertals have interbred with modern human ancestors,
passing along some of these traits?

23. Mousterian Industry
• Neandertals were associated with the culture
known as Mousterian or Middle Paleolithic;
includes a complex and distinctive type of fl aking
called the Levallois
• This technique involves preparing a stone core
and then fl aking the raw materials for tools from
this core
• They developed specialized tools for skinning and
preparing meat, hunting, woodworking, and
hafting

24. Examples of the Mousterian tool kit, including
(from left to right), a Levallois point,
a perforator, and a side scraper.

25. Did they speak?
• Philip Lieberman and Edmund Crelin
reconstructed the Neandertal vocal tract and
conclude that, like human babies, Neandertals
could not express the full range of sounds
necessary for articulate speech.
• The Kebara Neandertal skeleton includes the
hyoid bone, a part of the neck that can survive
from ancient settings. The morphology of the
Kebara Neandertal’s hyoid is identical to that of a
living human’s. The Kebara people talked.

26. Intentional Burial
When this individual was found in a pit, it was the first
suggestion that Neandertals cared for their dead in a way
similar to modern humans’ methods.

28. Origin and Dispersal
FIRST MODERN HUMANS

29. What’s so modern about modern humans?
Modern humans have a number of anatomical characteristics that
distinguish them from premodern humans. These include a small face,
small jaws, small teeth, a vertical and high forehead, a narrow nasal
aperture, a narrow body trunk, and long legs.

30. Earliest discoveries of modern humans
The earliest of these specimens
comes from Omo Kibish, in
southernmost Ethiopia. Using
radiometric techniques, recent
redating of a fragmentary skull
(Omo 1) demonstrates that,
coming from 195,000 ya, this is
the earliest modern human yet
found in Africa—or, for that
matter, anywhere.

31. Key Early Modern Homo sapiens
Hominid Date Site
H. sapiens sapiens 110,000 ya Qafzeh (Israel)
H. sapiens sapiens 115,000 ya Skhul (Israel)
H. sapiens idaltu 154,000–160,000 ya Herto (Ethiopia)
H. sapiens 195,000 ya Omo (Ethiopia)
H. sapiens sapiens 40,000–45,000 ya Niah Cave (Borneo, Indonesia)
H. sapiens sapiens 40,000 ya Tianyuan Cave (China)
H. sapiens sapiens 30,000 ya Cro-Magnon (France)
H. sapiens sapiens 24,500 ya Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal)

32. H. floresiensis:
Something New
and Different
In late 2004, the world awoke to
the startling announcement
that an extremely small-bodied,
small-brained hominid had
been discovered in Liang Bua
Cave, on the island of Flores,
east of Java.
These remains consist of an
ncomplete skeleton of an adult
female (LB1) as well as
additional pieces from nine
other individuals, which the
press have collectively
nicknamed “hobbits.”

33. Symbolic artifacts from the
Middle Stone Age of Africa
and the Upper Paleolithic in
Europe.
It is notable that evidence of
symbolism is found in
Blombos Cave (77,000 ya)
and Katanda (80,000 ya),
both in Africa, a full 50,000
years before any comparable
evidence is known from
Europe.
Moreover, the ochre found
at Pinnacle Point is yet
another 80,000 years older,
dating to more than 160,000
ya.

34. Three Competing Models
ORIGIN AND DISPERSAL

35. Complete Replacement Model
• aka Out-of-Africa hypothesis
• developed by British paleoanthropologists
Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews in 1988
• proposes that anatomically modern populations
arose in Africa within the last 200,000 years and
then migrated from Africa, completely replacing
populations in Europe and Asia
• Y chromosome and mtDNA evidence

36. Partial Replacement Models
• suggest that modern humans originated in Africa
and then, when their population increased,
expanded out of Africa into other areas of the Old
World
• some interbreeding occurred between emigrating
Africans and resident premodern populations
elsewhere
• assumes that no speciation event occurred, and
all these hominids should be considered
members of H. sapiens

37. Regional Continuity Model
• aka Multiregional hypothesis
• closely associated with paleoanthropologist
Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan
• suggest that local populations continued their
indigenous evolutionary development from
premodern Middle Pleistocene forms to
anatomically modern humans

39. Key Questions
• Who are the first hominids that dispersed to
various parts of the Old World?
• What are the physiological and behavorial
characteristics of premodern humans?
• Where did the transition (from premodern to
modern humans) take place?

40. References
Fagan, Brian M. 2008. World Prehistory: A Brief Introduction,
Seventh Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson
Education, Inc.
Jurmain, Robert, et.al. 2006. Essentials of Physical
Anthropology, Seventh Edition. Belmonth, CA: Wadsworth.
Larsen, Clark Spencer. 2010. Essentials of Physical
Anthropology: Discovering our Origins. New York and
London: W.W. Norton & Company.
* All photos were taken from the books mentioned above; except from the
third slide.