Word: evolutionism
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By studying fossils, Vrba found that the populations of large mammals in these environments underwent a huge 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...
The big question now: How does the apparent quick exit from Africa affect one of the most heated debates in the field of human evolution? On one side are anthropologists who hold to the "out of Africa" theory -- the idea that Homo sapiens first arose only in Africa. Their opponents...
Not 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...
Counters Christopher Stringer of Britain's Natural History Museum: "If we look at the fossil record for the last half-million years, Africa is the only region that has continuity of evolution from primitive to modern humans." The oldest confirmed fossils from modern humans, Stringer points out, are from Africa...
This, after all, is the arena of human evolution, where no theory dies without a fight and no bit of new 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...