We have posted on the hominin remains found at Dmanisi in Georgia, and evidence of hominin presence in China 2.1 Million yeras ago (Ma). A recent paper provides some more information on this very early migration of hominins out of Africa 2.48 Ma, long before the first Homo sapiens appeared.
A few months ago we mentioned a new paper reported in the media that pushes the Out of Africa migration by pre-sapiens hominins to 2.4 Ma. We have just found it published: it is the paper by Giancarlo Scardia, Fabio Parenti, Daniel P. Miggins, AxelG erdes, Astolfo G.M. Araujo and Walter A.Neves, (Chronologic constraints on hominin dispersal outside Africa since 2.48?Ma from the Zarqa Valley, Jordan, Quaternary Science Reviews, Vol 219, 1 September 2019, pp 1-19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2019.06.007). It tells us that they found evidence of hominin presence in an area that those who would later reach Dmanisi and China had to cross on their trek out of Africa: The Middle East.
They mention the presence of hominins in China some 2.1 Ma, and in North Africa (2.4 Ma), - and we add the Homo georgicus found in Georgia (1.75 Ma) to their list.
They also report that even though the Levant does not have any sites as old as those mentioned above, they found stone tools in the Dawqara Formation sediments in Zarqa Valley, in Jordan that were buried some 300,000 years earlier thant the Chinese tools.
As Jordan lies in the corridor that any out-of-Africa Homo habilis would use to exit Africa, they conclude that these artifacts were made by these hominins.
They found Oldowan tools together with fossils of mammals in the Dawqara Formation. They were not found in a site (a camp site for instance), the tools were transported to where they were found by water and buried by riverine sediments. They dated these sediments to 2.48 Ma.
These Oldowan tools are primitive and predate the later Acheulean tools developed by Homo erectus. So clearly these hominins were Homo habilis.
This puts an early date for the first hominin migration out of Africa and into Eurasia.
The Abstract is the following:
"
Recent discoveries constrain the presence of hominins in North Africa since ca. 2.4?Ma and in China since ca. 2.1?Ma, providing a new temporal framework for the earliest migration out of Africa.
No Paleolithic sites of such age exist in the Levant, the natural corridor between Africa and Asia. The Dawqara Formation in the Zarqa Valley, Jordan, has been known since the early 1980s because of the
presence of artifacts at different stratigraphic levels within its fluvial sediments, consisting of choppers, cores, and flakes.
Although most of the artifacts display signs of transport, they bear unambiguous evidence of manufacture, and document hominin presence in the Zarqa Valley during the deposition of
Dawqara Formation. Based on integrated chronology provided by paleomagnetic, 40Ar⁄39Ar, and U-Pb dating methods, our study shows that the Dawqara Formation was deposited between 2.52+⁄-?0.01?Ma
and the Matuyama–Olduvai geomagnetic reversal (1.95?Ma). By linear interpolation, the artifact-bearing stratigraphic levels within the Dawqara Formation have ages of ca. 2.48?Ma, 2.24?Ma, 2.16?Ma, 2.06?Ma,
and 1.95?Ma, respectively, possibly documenting continuous hominin presence in the Zarqa Valley.
These new ages for the Dawqara assemblage constrain the earliest hominin dispersal out of Africa to the beginning of the Pleistocene, and pre-date by ca. 300 kyr the hominin occupation of Chinese Loess Plateau."
The North African tools are the 1.9-million- and 2.4-million-year-old artifacts and stone tool-cutmarked bones from Ain Boucherit, Algeria., Sahnouni M, et al., Science. 2018 Dec 14;362(6420):1297-1301. doi: 10.1126/science.aau0008. Epub 2018 Nov 29.
Sahnouni suggests that these old Algerian tools (slightly younger thant the Oldowan tools from East Africa - 2.6 Ma) "shows that ancestral hominins inhabited the Mediterranean fringe in northern Africa much earlier than previously thought. The evidence strongly argues for early dispersal of stone tool manufacture and use from East Africa or a possible multiple-origin scenario of stone technology in both East and North Africa.".
However there are even older tools found in Asia, in India to be more specific, that are 2.6 Ma. Were these the first hominins to leave Africa?
Last but not least, these Zarqa Valley "artifacts" have been dug up in a fluvial environment not unlike the setting where the Calico California stone tools were found, yet these American artifacts have been disregarded by orthodox science and labeled as geofacts (not man made, but shaped by natural forces).
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall ©
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