The traditional theory to explain human movementsand the one still accepted by the majority of people in the fieldis that humans dispersed across Eurasia in two waves. The first wave consisted of Homo erectus, who left Africa remarkably quicklyalmost...
How they got there and why they came are questions that can't be answered. According to most anthropology texts, there's no evidence that people could even speak 60,000 years ago, much less engage in the sorts of cooperative efforts necessary to buil...
As it turned out, there would be a great deal else to be puzzled about, and one of the most puzzling findings of all would come from Thorne's own part of the world, in the outback of Australia. In 1968, a geologist named Jim Bowler was poking around...
In the 1940s a Harvard paleontologist named Hallum Movius drew something called the Movius line, dividing the side with Acheulean tools from the one without. The line runs in a southeasterly direction across Europe and the Middle East to the vicinity...
29 THE RESTLESS APE 第二十九章 永不安分的类人猿 SOMETIME ABOUT A million and a half years ago, some forgotten genius of the hominid world did an unexpected thing. He (or very possibly she) took one stone and carefully used it to shape an...
What is certain is that sometime well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe. They possibly did so quite rapidly, increasing their range by as much as twenty...
There are several more plausible alternative explanations for how Homo erectus managed to turn up in Asia so soon after its first appearance in Africa. First, a lot of plus-or-minusing goes into the dating of early human remains. If the actual age of...
It was also discovered that Homo erectus skulls contained (or, in the view of some, possibly contained) a Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe of the brain associated with speech. Chimps don't have such a feature. Alan Walker thinks the spinal...
Although erectus had been known about for almost a century it was known only from scattered fragmentsnot enough to come even close to making one full skeleton. So it wasn't until an extraordinary discovery in Africa in the 1980s that its importanceor...
Luckily for us, one dida group of tool users, which seemed to arise from out of nowhere and overlapped with the shadowy and much disputed Homo habilis. This is Homo erectus, the species discovered by Eugene Dubois in Java in 1891. Depending on which...
