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...Nature article came only a week after an even more surprising report in the competing journal Science. U.S. and Indonesian researchers said they had redated fossil skull fragments found at two sites on the island of Java. Instead of being a million years old, as earlier analysis suggested, the fossils appear to date back nearly 2 million years. They are from the species known as Homo erectus -- the first primate to look anything like modern humans and the first to use fire and create sophisticated stone tools. Says F. Clark Howell, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley: "This...
...evidence from Java holds up, it means that protohumans left their African homeland hundreds of thousands of years earlier than anyone had believed, long before the invention of the advanced stone tools that, according to current textbooks, made the exodus possible. It would also mean that Homo erectus had plenty of time to evolve into two different species, one African and one Asian. Most researchers are convinced that the African branch of the family evolved into modern humans. But what about the Asian branch? Did it die out? Or did it also give rise to Homo sapiens...
While Dubois didn't find anything like Lucy, he discovered some intriguingly primitive fossils, a skullcap and a leg bone, in eroded sediments along the Solo River in Java. They looked partly human, partly simian, and Dubois decided that they belonged to an ancient race of ape-men. He called his creature Anthropopithecus erectus; its popular name was Java man. Over the next several decades, comparable bones were found in China (Peking man) and finally, starting in the 1950s, in Africa...
...most direct evidence of the time H. erectus arrived in Asia is obviously the ages of the fossils found there. But accurate dates are elusive, especially in Java. In contrast to East Africa's Rift Valley, where the underground record of geological history has been lifted up and laid bare by faulting and erosion, most Javan deposits are buried under rice paddies. Since the subterranean layers of rock are not so easy to study, scientists have traditionally dated Javan hominids by determining the age of fossilized extinct mammals that crop up nearby. The two fossils cited in the new Science...
...second thought, the bean-counters at Coffee Connection wouldn't take such a loss. They'd probably fish the beans out of the water and sell them as an ultra-rare blend. I can see the Coffee Connection News headline now: Colonial Java AAA Debuts: light, smoky, and fruity, with just an understated hint of sea-salt...