For generations, we believed that Africa was the birthplace of humans.
How wrong we were. Archaeology has revealed the astonishing truths about our lineage. For the most part, we thought the Cradle of Humankind was in African nations like Ethiopia and South Africa. However, a new finding has reshaped our understanding of human history.
How can one clue, 5,060 miles away, change human science forever?
What archaeology has explained about our ancestry is revealing, to say the least
Over the past century, we as humans have developed a deep-rooted need to understand where and what we came from.
Archaeology has revealed that our generation was not the first to “settle down”. About 9,000 years ago, people in Turkey used to build mud-brick houses that acted as streets, with society moving to and from on their roofs while residents entered their homes in holes above their houses.
For those of us with a proclivity for The Lord of the Rings, you may like to know that “hobbits” once populated Asia.
Science has revealed a diminutive species known as Homo florensiensis that was about 3 feet tall and lived in what is now Indonesia around 50,000 years ago.
Human science is a long and tightly wound string in our history
Technology has forever changed archaeology as new findings are made regularly that alter our human history.
A now world-famous mummy from the Ice Age was found in a 5,300 year old cave with a piece of dry-cured goat meat, basically the first-ever indication of humans treating their meat to make it more appetizing.
As we know, the migratory pattern of our ancestors led them to different regions of the world. North America had its own set of humans traversing the ancient landscape in search of their next home.
But for the past few decades, we thought that our earliest “cousins” emerged from the historic African continent.
As regions separated families, some developed unique characteristics that set them apart from the rest of early humankind. But a recent study has deconstructed one of our most ancient ancestors to reveal that we were miles off, 5,000 miles in fact.
A recent study has revealed that humans were spread out across the world
The study, “Squashed skulls found in China belong to first known East Asians”, published in Science, states that our previously held belief that Africa was the origin point in our history was, in fact, very far off.
A team of researchers digitally reconstructed squashed skulls found in China.
The Yunxian skulls revealed that the “dragon man” had a mix of primitive and modern features. This indicates that East Asia was home to a different type of ancestor that we have never encountered.
Even something as innocuous as a footprint in the sand can change our understanding of human history.
The squashed skulls in China have reshaped the roadmap of human migration
The team of researchers has proven that, in fact, the Rift Valley in Ethiopia, which is roughly 5,060 miles away, was not actually the birthplace of our early human ancestors.
We now know that African humans entered Europe and spread across a much wider expanse than previously thought.
These huge distances have challenged our previously proven notion that our ancestors followed a single path to Eurasia, and instead suggest that our early ancestors carved a much wider and earlier path towards what we now call Asia.
Science has played a vital role in developing a clearer picture of how humans migrated around the Earth.
Other discoveries of ancient skulls have pushed back the birth of our species by 500,000 years. But this study has proven that we moved about the planet much earlier than science taught us.