You are on page 1of 4

1

Robert Heaps
4/21/15
Professor Potter
Anthropology, 4:00
Research Paper

Origins of Modern Humans


A significant objective for anthropologists everywhere is to discover exactly how modern
humans originated. They draw conclusions and form theories based off of fossil evidence found
all over the world. These theories, though, dont always coincide with one another. There are
two major theories of the origin of modern man: Regional continuity and replacement.
A.R. Rogers in his article, How Much Can Fossils Tell Us about Regional Continuity?
describes regional continuity as genetic contribution of earlier populations to later populations
within regions (Rogers, 1995). Ian Tattersall in his article Out of Africa Again and Again?
more specifically describes that the regional continuity model holds that the highly archaic H.
erectus is nothing more than an ancient variant of H. sapiens and that for the past two million
years the history of our lineage has been one of a braided stream of evolving populations of this
species in all areas of the Old World, each adapting to local conditions, yet all consistently linked
by gene exchange. This theory was founded by Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist with
the University of Michigan. A key part of his theory, also, is the denial of the first humans
appearing in Africa.
The theory of replacement was developed by Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews.
Stringer is an accredited anthropologist and lead researcher at the Natural History Museum in

England, along with Andrews. The basis of the replacement model is a speciation event
occurring in Africa from the species homo heidelbegenesis. Tattersall states in his article that the
replacement model proposes that all modern human populations are descended from a single
ancestral population that emerged in one place at some time between about 150,000 and 100,000
years ago. The fossil evidence, thin as it is, suggests that this place of origin was somewhere
in Africa (Tattersall, 2003). The theory also suggests that modern humans migrated out of
Africa and replaced the pre-modern humans either by killing or out-competing them, along with
interbreeding.
Of these two theories, the replacement model is clearly more reliable. There is more and
more fossil evidence being discovered and dated, with their results supporting the theory. The
same cannot be said for the regional continuity model. Tattersal states that Africa was
consistently the center from which new lineages of hominids sprang evolutionary
developments occurred in both Europe and eastern Asia, but they involved populations that were
not only derived from but also eventually supplanted by emigrants from Africa Tattersal claims
that in 1991 a hominid lower jaw that its describers allocated to H. erectus was found this jaw
was as old as 1.8 million years, and with four crania from the site now in hand, there is ample
evidence of an unexpectedly early hominid exodus from Africa. His article continues to tell of
stone tools found in Europe that are similar to what modern humans utilized in Africa thousands
of years before. (Tattersall, 2003). Science Daily, in their article New Study Shows
Neanderthals Were Not Our Ancestors, describes an experiment that was conducted on
measuring the differences between modern humans and Neanderthals. A quantitative method
was created to discover the degree of difference between different species of primates. Modern
humans were compared with Neanderthals, and the end result was that the differences measured

between modern humans and Neanderthals were significantly greater than those found between
subspecies or populations of the other species studied. A.R. Rogers, in his article, utilized a
thought experiment in order to prove his point that regional continuity is an unrealistic theory.
He utilized mathematical equations along with hypothetical data, and still wasnt able to prove
that regional continuity was a feasible way for modern humans to have originated. There is
overwhelming evidence that not all species of people developed into modern humans, like the
regional continuity theory states.
The two present primary theories of modern human origins differ substantially. Regional
continuity claims that groups of pre-modern humans evolved into modern humans independently,
with limited interaction with other species. The replacement theory states that modern humans
originated in Africa, moved to Asia and Europe, and eventually became the primary species of
man. The replacement theory is the more credible theory, because it has a substantial amount of
evidence to support it, unlike the regional continuity claim.

References
Rogers, A. R. (1995). How Much Can Fossils Tell Us about Regional Continuity?. Current
Anthropology, (4). 674.
New Study Shows Neanderthals Were Not Our Ancestors. (2004, January 27). Retrieved April
28, 2015, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/01/040127085316.htm
Tattersall, I. (2003). out of Africa againand again?. Scientific American Special Edition, 13(2),
38-45.
Eportfolio Link

You might also like