Eight small teeth found in an Israeli cave raise the possibility that modern humans originated in Israel and not Africa, suggests a paper recently published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
The teeth date to the Middle Pleistocene and are similar in size and shape to teeth attributed to hominids from other sites in Israel, such as Skhul and Qafzeh. Researchers excavated these latest remains from Qesem Cave in central Israel.
“The Qesem teeth come from a time period between 200,000 to 400,000 years ago when human remains from the Middle East are very scarce,” co-author Rolf Quam said in a Binghamton University press release.
If the teeth can be linked directly to modern humans, the researchers say this means either one of two things: our species originated in what is now Israel, or Homo sapiens migrated from Africa far earlier than is presently accepted.
Hmmm,
could have been the first fugitive, banished from his homeland.
Seems to me, that considering, all the discovered - documented and appreciated roots {to humanity} that have turned up in Africa, it would take far more than a few teeth to justify such a bold claim.
Which will be especially ironic seeing as how they don’t believe in evolution but consistency has never been one of their virtues.
Kind of like global warming “skeptics” they don’t believe a thing any climatologist, that is climate experts, tells them,
unless a Lindzen, or the like, feeds them a line they like and then it’s all over the echo chamber with it,
must be a human thing. . .
Which will be especially ironic seeing as how they don’t believe in evolution but consistency has never been one of their virtues.
Kind of like global warming “skeptics” they don’t believe a thing any climatologist, that is climate experts, tells them,
unless a Lindzen, or the like, feeds them a line they like and then it’s all over the echo chamber with it,
must be a human thing. . .
I recall hearing about a Geologist who worked for Exxonmobile, who believed in the biblical creation story, but because they were trained as a geologist they also knew that oil is produced over millions of years! That person is heroic
http://www.kheper.net/topics/Gooch/index.html Come back Stan Gooch! Is anyone familiar with his fun theories? Colin Wilson finds him very impressive, so that should be enough cause for alarm.
My guess is that there’s a mistake in the interpretation. Perhaps the teeth have been misdated—it’s really tricky to get reliable dating with any single sample. There are plenty of ways that the dating can be way off. Perhaps they have misinterpreted the teeth as modern. They’ll definitely need some more discoveries to give this hypothesis much credence. It does tend to fly in the face of other stuff we know about that period.
I won’t go into details here, but it’s far from clear whom the teeth belonged to. Anybody who is interested to find out more on this topic can google it, but I want to make one thing clear here: it is probably a mistake to use a few teeth to conduct a taxonomic diagnosis and what is most likely misdated here are not the actual teeth but the origin on the modern man. As I have already discussed in the Out of Africa thread, there is a number of serious problems with the Out of Africa hypothesis.
