̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Homo sapiens

Earliest human remains in eastern Africa dated to more than 230,000 years ago

sc604 — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 15:28:02 +0000

̽��ֱ��age of the oldest fossils in eastern Africa widely recognised as representing our species, Homo sapiens, has long been uncertain. Now, dating of a massive volcanic eruption in Ethiopia reveals they are much older than previously thought.

Opinion: No giant leap for mankind: why we’ve been looking at human evolution in the wrong way

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 13:21:45 +0000

Understanding exactly how and why humans evolved is clearly one of the most important goals in science. But despite a significant amount of research to date, these questions have remained a bit of a mystery. Of course, there is no shortage of theories – it has even been suggested that humans are just visiting aliens. However, most of the credible models tend to take something that is unique to humans – such as language – and show how all the other bits of being human derive from that.

But focusing on one dramatic change as an evolutionary driver in this way may not be the best approach to understanding our past. ̽��ֱ��question was discussed in a series of papers in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Hunting is a good example, as it is often used to explain human evolution. We eat far more meat than other primates – most of them are in fact entirely vegetarian. It has therefore been argued that meat was the high quality resource that allowed humans to evolve large and complex brains.

What’s more, it takes communication, cooperation and technology (those stone tools came in handy) to acquire it, so hunting could also explain a number of other typically human traits. Eating large animals also could also taught humans to share, leading to social cohesion and interdependence. Hunting is just one of many models that have been proposed to explain human uniqueness and cultural complexity – language, fire, cooking and grandmothers, who enhanced human success by investing in their daughters children instead of having more themselves.

Vince Smith/Flickr, CC BY-SA

̽��ֱ��problem with these theories is that they depend on evolution being a sort of one-step game, where one change produces a great leap forward, one from which other changes cascade. But the record does not support this. We split from our last common ancestor with the chimpanzees 5-6m years ago. But when we look at human ancestors between then and now, we do not find a single moment of dramatic change. Instead, it was cumulative – some 4m years ago we started walking upright on two legs, and about a million years later we started using stone tools. ̽��ֱ��size of our brains only started enlarging about 2m years ago.

Certainly there were periods that involved a more dynamic series of changes than others. For example, there was one at the beginning based on how hominins moved across the landscape, becoming bipedal and ranging over larger areas. Then about 2-3m years ago, there was another period of changes when brain size started to increase and childhood and adolescence periods started getting longer. This was coupled with boosts in technology and resource acquisition, such as hunting and gathering.

A final such period occurred in the last half million years, when cognitive changes associated with language, cooperation and cumulative culture – such as the development of more complex and composite technology, and the use of material culture for symbolic purposes – came to the fore. But even these periods, each lasting hundreds of thousands of years, were multi-event processes.

̽��ֱ��big picture

As far as we can tell, human evolution is like a mosaic of change, made up of many small steps, each of which adds a piece to what it is to be human. Only at the end do we see the full configuration, but had we stopped the clock at any point along that continuum, we would have seen a different mosaic. Human evolution is not one great transition, therefore, but many smaller ones.

Part of the problem in trying to see the big pattern of human evolution is that we look at it through the lens of the present – how we are today is the guide to how we were in the past. But the past was different in so many ways, and our extinct relatives show some surprising departures from what we expect when we base those expectations on ourselves.

̽��ֱ��remains of a Neanderthal wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Take body size. In the developed world, we are big, and sadly getting bigger in unhealthy ways. Better nutrition has led to increased body mass in many populations across the world. We also associate being large with being human, as it was thought that our ultimate ancestors, the australopithecines (living in Africa between about 4m and 2m years ago) were small, and that our own genus, Homo, marked a substantial increase in body size.

But that may not have been the case. In fact, nearly all the early, extinct species and subspecies of Homo were small, if not very small. ̽��ֱ��global average human body weight (combined sexes) now is over 60kg. No fossil hominin until the Neanderthals and modern humans reached an average of 50 kg, and most were below 40 kg – half the size of the average American male. Pygmy populations in Africa and Asia also weigh about 40kg, which means that most early and extinct hominins were pygmy sized. There are many advantages to large body size – such as resisting predators, access to larger prey – and the fact that our earliest ancestors did not become large tells us a lot about the energetic constraints under which they lived and reproduced.

We may picture our ancestors as rugged versions of ourselves, tall and strong, but they were not. We need to start thinking of them as creatures that were as unique as ourselves, but in different ways.

Understanding more about human evolution will depend on finding more fossils and applying more and more powerful scientific techniques. Ancient DNA, for example, is revealing extraordinary new details about our recent past. As important, however, will be using our greater knowledge of the overall pattern of human evolution, its tempo and mode, to inform us about the cumulative processes by which we became human, rather than expecting that with one great evolutionary bound, our hero was free.

Robert Foley, Professor of Human Evolution, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Robert Foley (Department of Archaeology and Anthropology) discusses the cumulative processes by which we became human.

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Australopithecus afarensis reconstruction

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Was the dawn of man among trees in the cradle of disease?

fpjl2 — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 08:22:23 +0000

When the family of Albert Perry - a recently deceased African-American man from South Carolina - sent a sample of his DNA to be tested by a genealogy website, they weren’t expecting to rewrite the history of mankind. They were probably just a bit curious.

But Perry’s DNA contained a Y chromosome not seen before, one which potentially reveals that the last common male ancestor in the paternal line of humanity is almost twice as old as previously thought – some 338,000 years, even though the oldest fossil of man is only 195,000 years old.

̽��ֱ��DNA was traced back to the Mbo ethnic group in central Africa, based primarily in South West Cameroon, suggesting that the dawn of modern man took place deep in the inhospitable forests of this region rather than the savannahs of East Africa, the area that conventional science has – until now – located as the site of the first homo sapiens.

This Friday, a student-run conference hosted by Cambridge’s Biological Anthropology Division will focus on this groundbreaking research, published earlier this year by a team from the ̽��ֱ�� of Arizona and UCL, to ask some of the major questions it raises: How might this change our understanding of human evolution? Does the forest still influence who we are today?

Relocating Origin will feature experts from Cambridge and elsewhere, including one of the UCL scientists who conducted the original research, Professor Mark Thomas, and will be available to watch through a live webcast.

“This is a hugely exciting time for human origin studies. If these early findings are proved correct, the current narratives of the beginning of our species have been predicated on a different location and a different time!” says Katie Fitzpatrick, a PhD candidate in the Department and one of the conference organisers.

“ ̽��ֱ��hot, humid forests work against fossil preservation as they just decay in such climates – unlike arid regions that have been the focus of early human research so far. However, the evidence may still be in the rainforests but we haven’t been looking”.

By asking ‘What if Adam lived in the forest?’ scientists will explore the implications not just for genetics but human culture, technology and society.

̽��ֱ��impact of a forest home on the social structure of the first homo sapiens will be examined by the Division’s Dr Peter Walsh, who researches social networks in primate ecology. A major theme of the conference will be what’s known as Behavioural Immune System hypothesis – the idea that social behaviour is an intrinsic part of the immune system, and infectious disease transmission can dictate social contact, especially in the heart of Africa.

“ ̽��ֱ��forest region of central Africa is the disease epicentre of the universe! HIV from chimps, bats carrying rabies, Ebola, SARS, insect vectors carrying malaria and parasitic diseases like river blindness and elephantitis, loads of fecal-oral diseases… It’s described as ‘pathogen rain’,” says Walsh.

“You live in a big group with lots of social interaction, and one of you gets Ebola – everybody dies. So it doesn’t make evolutionary sense in such places”.

Walsh suggests that the region’s ‘pathogen rain’ could have stunted early human development, as limited interactions due to fear of disease meant that ideas and innovations were unable to spread and build, leaving our first ancestors languishing in the forest for thousands of years.

“In disease hotbeds, people have much stronger group identification, which makes them much more hostile – part of the behavioural immune system. You see the same in gorillas.”

One possible theory Walsh will discuss is that, instead of a “key innovation” – such as walking upright or fire - triggering human development, just getting out of the disease-riddled forests could have allowed for much greater social interaction that sparked a “cascade of technological innovation”.

And it is a much more recent human innovation opening up these possibilities. We now live in the age of ‘big data’. ̽��ֱ��access to unprecedented reams of digital information is transforming almost every area of academic research in tandem with society in general: “This capacity to have genetic samples from vast numbers of people is giving us a whole new view of why we are the way we are, and this is only the start,” says Walsh.

While the evolutionary scientists stress that much more research needs to be done in the region, which presents all manner of challenges from unfavourable climates for fossilized evidence to political instability, the conference will be the first to look at the emergence of this brand new direction in the field, and how it can be taken “from speculation to science”.

“Certain methodologies need to be nailed down, which will take a few years, but this avenue of investigation could lead to the reassessment of a huge range of thinking around fire, meat-eating, bipedalism, locomotion – when and how these things happened are all potentially up for discussion,” adds Walsh.

“What we want to ask is how this might change things, to get people to start thinking about the possibility that the last fifty years of research has been mistaken in its assumptions about where we came from.”

For a full list of speakers and topics, and a link to the live webcast of the conference, go to http://relocatingorigin.soc.srcf.net/

Inset image: Dr Peter Walsh

A student-led conference to be webcast live will ask, in light of recent research, whether the story of human origin is radically different from established thinking, and what that might mean for everything from genetics to the birth of culture.

̽��ֱ��forest region of central Africa is the disease epicentre of the universe… It’s described as ‘pathogen rain’

Peter Walsh

Peter Walsh. Banner image credit Strollerdos

Forest region of South West Cameroon

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Beachcombing for early humans in Africa

amb94 — Fri, 31 May 2013 14:49:20 +0000

In the middle of an African desert, with no water to be found for miles, scattered shells, fishing harpoons, fossilised plants and stone tools reveal signs of life from the water’s edge of another era. In 40°C heat, anthropologists Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr and Professor Robert Foley from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES) are painstakingly searching for clues to the origin and diversification of modern humans, from the artefacts they left behind to the remains of the people themselves.

Kenya, East Africa, has long been known as the ‘cradle of mankind’ following the discovery of fossils thought to be of the first members of the human family, which arose in Africa around 6–7 million years ago. Various distinct species evolved from these ancestors over millions of years, including our own – Homo sapiens – around 250,000 years ago.

“A lot of the research on the origins of modern humans has focused on defining their point of origin, then understanding why humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago to colonise the rest of the world – known as the Out of Africa model,” said Mirazón Lahr. “But we have no idea what happened between 200,000 years and 60,000 years ago. We also have very little information on what occurred inside Africa after 60,000 years, when the different population groups and languages we see today evolved. ̽��ֱ��genetics suggest that the expansion out of Africa is just the tip of a massive population expansion inside the continent.”

Mirazón Lahr’s In Africa project, recently awarded five-year funding from the European Research Council, is investigating the evolutionary history of modern human populations. “ ̽��ֱ��challenge is to find the sites where evidence of these early people can be recovered – their stone tools, the animals they hunted, their ornaments and, ultimately, the fossils of the people themselves,” she said.

East Africa has played a central role in all earlier phases of human evolution. She has chosen to focus on this region based on the theory that its past environment was suitable for sustained occupation over time. But East Africa is huge, and finding the right place to look is absolutely crucial. Mirazón Lahr used satellite technology to find the first clues.

“In the past there were periods of enormous rainfall in the tropics. When glaciers melted in the northern hemisphere, due to climate change, the water evaporated and then fell in the tropics as monsoon rains,” she said. “ ̽��ֱ��lakes were much higher and their margins were wider. We are using satellite images of the region to reconstruct where the ancient lake margins would have been when the lakes were last high, and that’s where we look.”

Mirazón Lahr and Foley have already carried out three field expeditions, in 2009, 2010 and 2011, to investigate their two chosen sites: the Turkana and the Nakuru-Naivasha basins of the Rift Valley in Kenya, and have made some spectacular finds on the ancient Turkana beaches.

“Ten thousand years ago, this area was wetter, with gazelles, hippos and lions, and the beaches are still there even though the water is long gone. We’ve found shells on the surface, and harpoons the people used to fish with. We go there and we just walk,” said Mirazón Lahr. “A lot has already been exposed by the wind, and occasionally we find sites where things are buried, and then we dig.”

“We’re looking at the lithics – stone tools – and how these relate to times of particularly high lake levels,” said Mirazón Lahr. “Then we’re looking at the fauna and, if we’re lucky, we find actual human fossils. ̽��ֱ��oldest fossil ever found that looks like a modern human is 200,000 years old, and comes from the basin of Lake Turkana. We’re trying to find the fossils that mark the origin of Homo sapiens. ̽��ֱ��ancient Turkana beach is an incredibly fossil-rich site, and we’ve already found such exciting things!

“We have many human remains – about 700 fragments – mostly dating from between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago, which match the age of this beach. To do the population biology and answer the questions about diversity we need these large numbers. This is already the biggest collection of this age in Africa.”

̽��ֱ��primitive technologies that our early ancestors left behind change over time, and comparing finds dated to different times can advance understanding of our evolutionary trajectory. “We think the evolution to modern humans is associated with changes in behaviour and in technology, for example in their tool use,” said Mirazón Lahr. “We’ve already found evidence that they started using animal bones to make tools, which was rare in earlier populations.”

“ ̽��ֱ��people who lived around this lake 10,000 years ago used microliths – a form of miniaturised stone tool technology,” said Foley. “Instead of producing one or two big flakes like the earliest modern humans, they produced lots of very small flakes to make composite tools. This is a sign of the flexibility of the way modern humans adapted to different conditions. We’ve also found a beach in the Turkana Basin from about 200,000 years ago and that has its own very different fossilised fauna, and very different stone tools. ̽��ֱ��technology and the people changed a lot over the past 200,000 years.”

Mirazón Lahr emphasises that geography and climate played a critical role in the origins and diversification of modern humans. “ ̽��ֱ��times when the lakes were high were periods of plenty in East Africa,” she said. “When it was very wet there were lots of animals, the vegetation could grow, and you can imagine that the people would have thrived.” East Africa had a unique mosaic environment with lake basins, highlands and plains that provided alternative niches for foraging populations over this period. Mirazón Lahr believes that these complex conditions were shaped by varying local responses to global climate change.

“We think that early modern humans could live in the region throughout these long periods, even if they had to move between basins.” With a network of habitable zones, human populations survived by expanding, contracting and shifting ranges according to the changing conditions. By comparing the fossil records from different basins over time, Mirazón Lahr hopes to establish a spatial and temporal pattern of human occupation over the past 200,000 years.

Her approach is a multidisciplinary one, combining genetic, fossil, archaeological and palaeoclimatic information to form an accurate picture of events. Drawing on her wide-ranging interests from molecular genetics to lithics and prehistory, she believes that the way to find novel insights is to consider each problem from various angles.

This approach is intrinsic to the In Africa project, in which she and Foley are not just searching for new fossils, but also trying to build a complete picture of our early ancestors’ lives and the external forces that shaped their evolution, both biological and behavioural. “ ̽��ֱ��project will be one of the first investigations into humans of this date in East Africa,” said Foley. “Given Africa is where we all come from, that’s critical.”

From the earliest modern humans to the present day, our species has evolved dramatically in both biological and behavioural terms. What forces prompted these momentous changes?

We have many human remains – about 700 fragments – mostly dating from between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago, which match the age of this beach. This is already the biggest collection of this age in Africa

Marta Mirazón Lahr

Alex Wilshaw

Stone tools used by Homo sapiens

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Scientists use genetics and climate reconstructions to track the global spread of modern humans out of Africa

bjb42 — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:00:36 +0000

By integrating genetics with high resolution historical climate reconstructions, scientists have been able to predict the timing and routes taken by modern humans during their expansion out of Africa. Their research reveals that the spread of humans out of Africa was dictated by climate, with their entry into Europe possibly delayed by competition with Neanderthals. ̽��ֱ��research is published today, 17 September, in the journal PNAS.

Dr Anders Eriksson, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the lead author of the paper said: “By combining extensive genetic information with climate and vegetation models, we were able to build the most detailed reconstruction of human history so far.”

̽��ֱ��role of climate change in determining the timing of the expansion of human populations has been long debated. ̽��ֱ��oldest fossil remains of anatomically modern humans are found in Africa and date back to around 200 thousand years ago, but there is no trace outside Africa until 100 thousand years later.

̽��ֱ��newly published model provides the first direct link between climate change and the timing of the expansion out of Africa, as well as the routes taken.

To investigate the role of climate, the Cambridge scientists built a highly detailed model tracking the fate of all individuals on the planet. ̽��ֱ��project involved specialists from a variety of fields. Working together with climatologists and vegetation modellers, they reconstructed climate and sea level changes and their effect on food availability through time, with a resolution of 100km. After exploring several million demographic scenarios (e.g. birth rates, local movement rates, link between food availability and population sizes), they were able to identify the scenarios that were most compatible with the geographic patterns of genetic diversity in modern humans. Working with anthropologists and archaeologists, they were then able to compare these scenarios against the dates and localities of known archaeological and fossil finds.

̽��ֱ��demographic scenarios chosen by the model revealed a link between food availability and population density in the past was very similar to the link found in present day hunter-gatherers. Based on this link, the model found that climate prevented humans from exiting Africa until a favourable window appeared in North-East Africa approximately 70-55k years ago. Most movement occurred through the so-called Sothern Route, exiting Africa via the Bab-el-Mandeb strait into the Arabian Peninsula.

̽��ֱ��dating of the out-of-Africa exit as well as the arrival times for other continents identified by the model, were also found to largely agree with archaeological and fossil evidence, with the notable exception of Europe. For Europe, the model based on climate predicted arrival times approximately 10 thousand years earlier than the available archaeological evidence. This discrepancy could be explained by competition with Neanderthals, which was not accounted for in their model, and would likely have slowed down the colonization of Europe by modern humans.

Dr Manica, who co-led the study, said: “ ̽��ֱ��idea that we can reconstruct climate, and estimate food availability and finally figure out the demographic changes and movements of our ancestors all over the world is simply amazing. ̽��ֱ��fact that most of our results are in agreement with archaeological and anthropological evidence - which was not used to generate our model - points to the fact that our reconstructions based on genetics are quite realistic.”

̽��ֱ��research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the BBSRC.

Research indicates the out-of-Africa spread of humans was dictated by the appearance of favourable climatic windows.

̽��ֱ��idea that we can reconstruct climate, and estimate food availability and finally figure out the demographic changes and movements of our ancestors all over the world is simply amazing.

Andrea Manica

Andrea Manica.

Diagram showing spread of humans from Africa.

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Strength in numbers

gm349 — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 19:01:17 +0000

New research sheds light on why, after 300,000 years of domination, European Neanderthals abruptly disappeared. Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have discovered that modern humans coming from Africa swarmed the region, arriving with over ten times the population as the Neanderthal inhabitants.

̽��ֱ��reasons for the relatively sudden disappearance of the European Neanderthal populations across the continent around 40,000 years ago has for long remained one of the great mysteries of human evolution. After 300 millennia of living, and evidently flourishing, in the cold, sub–glacial environments of central and western Europe, they were rapidly replaced over all areas of the continent by new, anatomically and genetically ‘modern’ (i.e. Homo sapiens) populations who had originated and evolved in the vastly different tropical environments of Africa.

̽��ֱ��most plausible answer to this long-debated question has now been published today, 29 July, in the journal Science by two researchers from the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge – Professor Sir Paul Mellars, Professor Emeritus of Prehistory and Human Evolution, and Jennifer French, a second-year PhD student.

By conducting a detailed statistical analysis of the archaeological evidence from the classic ‘Perigord’ region of southwestern France, which contains the largest concentration of Neanderthal and early modern human sites in Europe, they have found clear evidence that the earliest modern human populations penetrated the region in at least ten times larger numbers than those of the local Neanderthal populations already established in the same regions. This is reflected in a sharp increase in the total number of occupied sites, much higher densities of occupation residues (i.e. stone tools and animal food remains) in the sites, and bigger areas of occupation in the sites, revealing the formation of much larger and apparently more socially integrated social groupings.

Faced with this dramatic increase in the incoming modern human population, the capacity of the local Neanderthal groups to compete for the same range of living sites, the same range of animal food supplies (principally reindeer, horse, bison and red deer), and the same scarce fuel supplies to tide the groups over the extremely harsh glacial winters, would have been massively undermined. Additionally, almost inevitably, repeated conflicts or confrontations between the two populations would arise for occupation of the most attractive locations and richest food supplies, in which the increased numbers and more highly coordinated activities of the modern human groups would ensure their success over the Neanderthal groups.

̽��ֱ��archaeological evidence also strongly suggests that the incoming modern groups possessed superior hunting technologies and equipment (e.g. more effective and long-range hunting spears), and probably more efficient procedures for processing and storing food supplies over the prolonged and exceptionally cold glacial winters. They also appear to have had more wide-ranging social contacts with adjacent human groups to allow for trade and exchange of essential food supplies in times of food scarcity.

Whether the incoming modern human groups also possessed more highly developed brains and associated mental capacities than the Neanderthals remains at present a matter of intense debate. But the sudden appearance of a wide range of complex and sophisticated art forms (including cave paintings), the large-scale production of elaborate decorative items (such as perforated stone and ivory beads, and imported sea shells), and clearly ‘symbolic’ systems of markings on bone and ivory tools – all entirely lacking among the preceding Neanderthals – strongly point to more elaborate systems of social communications among the modern groups, probably accompanied by more advanced and complex forms of language.

All of these new and more complex behavioural patterns can be shown to have developed first among the ancestral African Homo sapiens populations, at least 20,0000 to 30,000 years before their dispersal from Africa, and progressive colonisation (and replacement of earlier populations) across all regions of Europe and Asia from around 60,000 years onwards.

If, as the latest genetic evidence strongly suggests, the African Homo sapiens and European Neanderthal populations had been evolving separately for at least half a million years, then the emergence of some significant contrasts in the mental capacities of the two lineages would not be a particularly surprising development, in evolutionary terms.

Professor Sir Paul Mellars, Professor Emeritus of Prehistory and Human Evolution at the Department of Archaeology, said: “In any event, it was clearly this range of new technological and behavioural innovations which allowed the modern human populations to invade and survive in much larger population numbers than those of the preceding Neanderthals across the whole of the European continent. Faced with this kind of competition, the Neanderthals seem to have retreated initially into more marginal and less attractive regions of the continent and eventually – within a space of at most a few thousand years – for their populations to have declined to extinction – perhaps accelerated further by sudden climatic deterioration across the continent around 40,000 years ago.”

Whatever the precise cultural, behavioural and intellectual contrasts between the Neanderthals and intrusive modern human populations, this new study published in Science demonstrates for the first time the massive numerical supremacy of the earliest modern human populations in western Europe, compared with those of the preceding Neanderthals, and thereby largely resolves one of the most controversial and long-running debates over the rapid decline and extinction of the enigmatic Neanderthal populations.

Volume of modern humans infiltrating Europe cited as critical factor in the demise of the Neanderthals.

Faced with this kind of competition, the Neanderthals seem to have retreated initially into more marginal and less attractive regions of the continent and eventually – within a space of at most a few thousand years – for their populations to have declined to extinction – perhaps accelerated further by sudden climatic deterioration across the continent around 40,000 years ago.

Professor Sir Paul Mellars, Professor Emeritus of Prehistory and Human Evolution at the Department of Archaeology

Image Dora Kemp, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Map of the migration of modern man out of Africa. Triangles represent Aurignacian (considered the first modern humans) split-base points.

<p>[caption id="attachment_19297" align="alignnone" width="944" caption="Image credit: Dora Kemp, McDonald Institute for Archaeological ResearchImage credit: Dora Kemp, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research"]<a href="/%3Ca%20href%3D"http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/research/news/strength-in-numbers/attachment/110728-mellars-map-2/">http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/research/news/strength-in-numbers/attachment..." rel="attachment wp-att-19297"><img class="size-large wp-image-19297" title="Map of modern man migration. Triangles indicate Aurignacian (considered the first modern humans) split-base points." src="/%3Ca%20href%3D"http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/research/files/2011/07/110728-Mellars-map1-944x531.jpg">http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/research/files/2011/07/110728-Mellars-map1-9..." alt="" width="944" height="531" /></a>[/caption]</p>

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