The discovery of 2.4-million-year-old stone tools and butchered bones at a site in Algeria suggests our distant hominin relatives spread into the northern regions of Africa far earlier than archaeologists assumed. The find adds credence to the newly emerging suggestion that ancient hominins lived—and evolved—outside a supposed Garden of Eden in East Africa.
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To put these dates into perspective, our species, Homo sapiens, emerged 300,000 years ago. So the unknown hominins who built these tools were romping around eastern and northern Africa some 2.3 million years before modern humans hit the scene. The new discoveries at Ain Boucherit, the details of which were published today in Science, suggest North Africa wasn’t just a place where human ancestors lived and developed tools—it was a place where they evolved.
Indeed, this new research is feeding into an emerging narrative, whereby humans evolved across the African continent as a whole, and not merely in East Africa as per conventional thinking. What’s more, it should spur increased archaeological interest in northern Africa.
- More Here
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To put these dates into perspective, our species, Homo sapiens, emerged 300,000 years ago. So the unknown hominins who built these tools were romping around eastern and northern Africa some 2.3 million years before modern humans hit the scene. The new discoveries at Ain Boucherit, the details of which were published today in Science, suggest North Africa wasn’t just a place where human ancestors lived and developed tools—it was a place where they evolved.
Indeed, this new research is feeding into an emerging narrative, whereby humans evolved across the African continent as a whole, and not merely in East Africa as per conventional thinking. What’s more, it should spur increased archaeological interest in northern Africa.
- More Here
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