Earlier this year, in my March 2nd post, I quoted Mansfield and Vaneechoutte, 2024 who put forward a new hypothesis about the split between Pan (chimpancees), Gorilla, and Homo. Instead of taking place in Africa, they argue that the split happened in Eurasia.
Since one of my recent posts dealt with the Chimpanzee-Human (Homo) spilt, assuming the orthodox view that it took place inside Africa, in today's post we will revisit the possibility of an Eurasian origin for the Homo genus.
Mansfield and Vaneechoutte's paper
In their article, Mansfield and Vaneechoutte elaborate on the lack of fossils inside Africa of a common ancestor for chimps, gorillas, and humans.
Focusing on the very early presence of apes in the Anatolia and the Balkans at 10 to 6 million years ago, they suggest that the closure of Gibraltar that led to the dissecation of the Mediterranean Sea (Messenian Salinity Event), and the very arid period that followed that event, forced the "separate branches of European hominids to migrate out of the Mediterranean region." This migration led the ancestors of gorillas and chimpanzees-bonobos across the dry seabed of the Mediterranean, from Greece, into Africa.
The authors believe that the ancestors of Gorilla and Pan entered Africa from Eurasia in two separate migratory events, and a third lineage, the one leading to Homo, and eventually to us, humans, moved in another direction into the Arabian Peninsula. There, these future Homo survived the hyperarid period that had forced them out of Europe.
Tectonic rifting led to thhe reopening of Gibraltar, and the vast Zanclean Megaflood that took place 5.3 million years ago modified the geography and cut-off potential routes of entry into Africa (like Sinai), by refilling the Mediterranean basin up, in just two years, and flooding the Sinai region and the Red Sea. Isolating the ancestors of Homo in a humid refuge in Arabia, isolated from all other apes.
The Pan lineage, of the chimpanzees and bonobos went deep into Africa and there, it split, with a branch evolving into the Australopithecines and the Paranthropus. These small-brained, small, primitive hominins are more adapted to a life in the trees than in the open savannas.
Homo, evolved, and produced the bigger, stronger, long-legged, brainier Homo erectus. This paper suggests that after the water levels dropped, coastal corridors and routes opened up, and these were used by erectus to walk westwards, into Africa, and east, crossing Eurasia from China and Indonesia, while the northern route through the Levant led to the Caucasus (Dmanisi) and Europe.
This theory was again put forward in a paper by Verhaegen, Munro, Bonne, Mansfield, & Vaneechoutte, 2026 (A hypothesis of ape and human evolution based on comparative biology and plate tectonics. Academia Biology, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.20935/AcadBiol8310) which is worth reading as it explains in detail the species, and gives a very good timeline for all these eventss.
Earlier, Böhme, 2017 had proposed an Eurasian origin of the Homo group and a Eurasian split between the ancestors of chimps and humans: suggesting that "the Pan-Homo split predated the Messinian and that the chimpanzee–human last common ancestor thrived in the Mediterranean region... major Miocene hominid radiations occurred outside Africa and endorse the hypothesis that the hominin clade arose in the Eastern Mediterranean."
However, these ideas are dismissed by mainstream scholars. I believe that the reason for this is that an African origin of Homo is crucial to the Out Of Africa theory.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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