And what better to start with than a discovery that threatens to upend the accepted theories...
An 8.7 million years old skull that MAY suggest the out of Africa theory is not accurate. I love the way this area of study is always being changed by new discoveries.
Previous reports claimed that our human ancestors originated in Africa. However, a newly discovered skull from an ape suggests we evolved from Europe.
Human Ancestors Evolved From Europe, Not Africa
The skull of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, which is thought to be the earliest known species in the human family tree and may have existed up to seven million years ago, is the primary source of the widely-held belief that our ancestors developed in Africa.
However, the skull of an 8.7 million-year-old ape discovered in Turkey indicates that they originally came from Europe. The skull belongs to an ape named Anadoluvius turkae that has just been discovered. It is considered the first specimen of early hominines, including humans and African apes
According to scientists, the skull shows that hominins spent more than five million years in western and central Europe before migrating to Africa from the Mediterranean. The current study is based on examining a partial skull discovered at the site in 2015 that is remarkably well-preserved and has most of the facial structure and the front section of the brain case.
The results are detailed in a study co-authored by an international team of academics led by Professor David Begun at the University of Toronto (U of T) and Professor Ayla Sevim Erol at Ankara University, which was published in Communications Biology.
The skull was discovered at Cankiri, a Turkish city located about 87 miles north of Ankara, at the Orakyerler fossil locality. Anadoluvius, according to researchers, lived in a dry forest environment, weighed between 110 and 130 pounds, and probably spent a lot of time on the ground.
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https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/4 ... ggests.htm