Word: erectus
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...dates ended up validating Curtis' previous work. The Mojokerto child and the Sangiran fossils were about 1.8 million and 1.7 million years old, respectively, comparable in age to the oldest Homo erectus from Africa. Here, then, was a likely solution to one of the great mysteries of human evolution. Says Swisher: "We've always wondered why it would take so long for hominids to get out of Africa." The evident answer: it didn't take them much time at all, at least by prehistoric standards -- probably no more than 100,000 years, instead of nearly a million...
...that's true, the notion that H. erectus needed specialized tools to venture from Africa is completely superseded. But Swisher doesn't find the conclusion all that surprising. "Elephants left Africa several times during their history," he points out. "Lots of animals expand their ranges. The main factor may have been an environmental change that made the expansion easier. No other animal needed stone tools to get out of Africa...
...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...