Word: erectus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...change. Many forest antelopes were replaced by giant buffalo and other grazers. Vrba believes that early hominid evolution can be interpreted the same way. As grasslands continued to expand and tree cover to shrink, forest-dwelling chimpanzees yielded to bipedal creatures better adapted to living in the open. H. erectus, finally, was equipped to spread throughout the Old World...
...early humans' adaptability let them move into new environments, Walker of Johns Hopkins believes, it was an increasingly carnivorous diet that drove them to do so. "Once you become a carnivore," he says, "the world is different. Carnivores need immense home ranges." H. erectus probably ate both meat and plants, as humans do today. But, says Walker, "there was a qualitative difference between these creatures and other primates. I think they actively hunted. I've always said that they should have gotten out of Africa as soon as possible." Could H. erectus have traveled all the way to Asia...
Swisher and his colleagues believe that their discovery bolsters the out-of- Africa side. If African and Asian H. erectus were separate for almost a million years, the reasoning goes, they could have evolved into two separate species. But it would be virtually impossible for those isolated groups to evolve into one species, H. sapiens. Swisher thinks the Asian H. erectus died off and H. sapiens came from Africa separately...
...necessarily, says Australia's Thorne, a leading multiregionalist, who offers another interpretation. Whenever H. erectus left Africa, the result would have been the same: populations did not evolve in isolation but in concert, trading genetic material by interbreeding with neighboring groups. "Today," says Thorne, "human genes flow between Johannesburg and Beijing and between Paris and Melbourne. Apart from interruptions from ice ages, they have probably been doing this through the entire span of Homo sapiens' evolution...
...evidence is ever interpreted the same way by opposing camps. The next big discovery could tilt the scales toward the multiregional hypothesis, or confirm the out-of-Africa theory, or possibly lend weight to a third idea, discounted by most -- but not all -- scientists: that H. erectus emerged somewhere outside Africa and returned to colonize the continent that spawned its ancestors...