Word: erectus
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...number of readers were happy to find similarities between our early ancestor Homo erectus ((March 14)) and the Homo sapiens of today. Margaret Segal of Bolingbrook, Illinois, thought our cover subject might have changed his name. She notes, "He looks alarmingly like a blind date I once had." Seymour Mandel of Chicago is positive: "This is the same guy who hit me up for some spare change downtown last week." Roberta Jaeger of St. Simons Island, Georgia, comments, "He's the spitting image of a fine man who once worked as my cook in Indonesia." Roberto Llamas of Miami thinks...
...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...
...research into Neanderthals, the relationship between them and modern humans is still a topic for hot debate. Some textbooks classify Neanderthals as a subspecies within Homo sapiens; others list a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis. British paleontologist Christopher Stringer is convinced that Neanderthals evolved in Europe from Homo erectus and suddenly became extinct between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago, unable to compete effectively with Homo sapiens originating in Africa. "In my view," he says, "they are a dead end -- highly evolved in their own direction but not in the direction of modern humans...
...life's origins -- at first glance, such subjects seem to have little in common with urgent reports datelined Hebron or Sarajevo. But make no mistake, the news value is profound. To cite this week's cover story, which Alexander edited: the conclusion of a recent scientific paper -- that Homo erectus wandered out of Africa nearly a million years earlier than was previously believed -- requires a change in our fundamental thinking about human evolution, and hence the way we understand ourselves. When the information is that important, Alexander muses, it doesn't matter "whether Homo erectus is still making news...