"If Jews were the first people how did we come from Africa?"

[Burnt Offerings]

If the OP or anyone else is interested in the subject of human origins, I'd recommend "Evolution: The Human Story" by Dr. Alice Roberts. It's a fantastic book, packed with beautiful photos, illustrations and diagrams accompanying detailed and comprehensive yet accessible explanations of the science behind evolutionary biology/physical anthropology/geology/fossil dating etc. It's a great introduction to the topic IMO. Roberts was involved with some exciting recent developments involving the origins of Stonehenge

 

[Gormur]

*There's evidence of human habitation in what we now know as Israel more than 100,000 years ago, but there's no evidence (that I'm aware of) that these humans spread further than the Near East.

OK this is interesting. I didn't know it went that far back

 

[JessFR]

It's frustrating how people who don't understand science think of it as like a religion, it's not.

The whole point of science is that it's just the use of reasoning, it's just a set of principles used to try and study the observable world in an accurate, reliable way.

Anything that science has to say is by definition something that can be rechecked by other scientists. It's an ever evolving pursuit of further understanding.

If you think science requires faith, I submit you don't appreciate what science actually is. It's not scientific if it requires faith alone.

The only part of science that requires any faith is faith that the principles of science work to establish understanding.

And you can establish that you have correct understanding if you can use that understanding to do things.

Scientific understanding has brought about so much good, saved so many lives, allowed us to achieve what once seemed impossible.

So you can see that the scientific method is effective in establishing understanding.

Religious faith is completely separate and has virtually no overlap other than that what many religious texts reach isn't in line with observations of the world.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Not that we know that but we do know, based on DNA (I guess science) that Jews are a people with unique genetic markers

You may know more about this than I do, but as far as I understand it there is not a distinct 'jew gene' or collection of genes. There is however a lot of overlap between Ashkenazi and Shepardic Jews that shows similarity between them and a very high proportion of common ancestry in the Middle East despite the fact that they have lived for centuries in Europe and Northern Africa. But those markers are shared my other Semitic people or people from that region. The DNA evidence seems to suggest that Jews have remained relatively robust as a community since they left the Middle East even though there are significant proportion of admixtures of new DNA from out-marriage to people in the places they settled (or if not marriage, certainly sex, possibly rape in many places). What is very interesting about MtDNA is that it points to 8,000,000 Ashkenazi Jews descending from just 4 common female ancestors. But there are also Jewish groups with minimal evidence of common ancestry and much of the science, or at least the conclusions drawn from it, seems to be disputed.

 

[Burnt Offerings]

OK this is interesting. I didn't know it went that far back

Skhul and Qafzeh hominins - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Israel has some great paleolithic sites, it was a place where Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals lived in relatively close proximity to each other and its been hypothesized that it's where Neanderthal DNA made its way into our genes, it was possibly the site of hot Homo Sapiens-on-Neanderthal action lol

Also some of the earliest signs of shared symbolic life, as the burials at Qafzeh are unambiguously intentional. Some of the skulls have an interesting mix of modern and archaic features, too, like relatively-prominent brow ridges.

Over the past few years some discoveries have been made that archeologists say push the date back even further but I haven't been following the developments too closely. It would appear that modern humans may have made "sorties" into the Near East for a long time but it took a while before the final push out of Africa

Israeli archaeologists find oldest human remains out of Africa, from nearly 200,000 years ago

***

www.haaretz.com

 

[Jabberwocky]

It makes sense given the Middle East is pretty much your first stopover on any journey out of Africa.

 

[Snafu in the Void]

I don't think humans were Jewish 600,000 years ago

Stuff was different back then apparently

 

[Jabberwocky]

I don't think humans were Jewish 600,000 years ago

Stuff was different back then apparently

I think as someone pointed out Jews only began with Abraham around 2,000 BCE. Before that they were just regular Hebrews of no particular account. Not yet chosen.

 

[Burnt Offerings]

It makes sense given the Middle East is pretty much your first stopover on any journey out of Africa.

There was also a (hypothetical) route via Tunisia, Sicily and Italy...I think that it's definitely a minority viewpoint but I know that it's been broached as a possibility because sea levels were significantly lower during the Pleistocene and it's unclear how some of the archaic humans made their way into Europe as there's a relative absence of fossils and/or tools in the border area between Europe and Asia, but there's evidence of Homo Erectus-associated Acheulean tools & fossils in Algeria and Italy, for example "Ceprano Man"

Ceprano Man - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Check out the image of that skullcap, now THAT'S a brow ridge!

 

[Burnt Offerings]

It's also always interested me how modern humans colonized Australia before they colonized Europe

 

[Jabberwocky]

It's also always interested me how modern humans colonized Australia before they colonized Europe

I guess for the larger part of human history people were nomadic hunters and gatherers rather than settled farmers. So perhaps early humans traversed Europe before Australia. Evidence of European settlements is around 50,000 years old but there were no real comparable fixed settlements in Australia until after 1788. The evidence of early humans in Australia is fossil dated at 65,000 years rather than archeological. And what happened between 65,000 years ago and 12,500 years ago when evidence of culture starts to become available is a big mystery.

 

[Burnt Offerings]

The Mungo lake fossils are pretty old. It's commonly cited as an example of ritual interment, which counts as culture I think.

The Aboriginal culture is interesting, they were (probably) the first seafarers but it seems like they abandoned that tradition immediately upon arriving in Australia, where like you said they lived a nomadic life on land. They was some very interesting "megafauna" back then too (around 50,000 years ago)

There's some very old grave sites in Europe too, although none that are that old that I know of. The paleolithic culture there was fairly rich actually, IMO...there are some beautiful artifacts and works of art from the ice age, like Chauvet cave etc. You look at some of the carvings and artifacts and it's hard to believe that they're somewhere around 30,000 years old

 

[Burnt Offerings]

This is another intriguing/controversial fossil from Australia that I find interesting:

WLH-50 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

EDIT: I was trying to remember the name of the one site with evidence of human/megafauna interaction, and I finally remembered!

Cuddie Springs - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Jabberwocky]

The human/mega-fauna co-existence hypothesis is a really interesting case study around the influence of progressive ideologies and wokeness in academic research. There is a strong trend to suppress, fail to fund, or simply slander any research into pre-colonial indigenous life that does not cast aborigines as tending the environment like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. I don’t have any idea of the truth of how they became extinct but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone arguing it was because of aboriginal hunting practices - even though that seems to remain a plausible explanation.

 

[Burnt Offerings]

Yeah I don't think it's a coincidence that they went bye-bye when people started showing up. The same thing happened to the megafauna which used to exist in the Americas when people started showing up there. Humans just said, this town ain't big enough for the two of us you damn megafauna! I'm megafauna numero uno!

Environmental factors probably played a role (esp. in the case of the American megafauna, which disappeared around the end of the last ice age) but I have little doubt that those large animals proved to be a tempting target for a new predator arriving on the scene, modern humans

 

[dalpat077]

Just to say I love it when threads go off topic but somehow morph into something even more useful and with much interesting information.

Some good stuff here and that I've never thought of e.g. Australia. Not a place I would have even considered for fossils.

And I was about to make an absolute fool of myself and say that fuck me: hats off to them early Australians. Unless they evolved there or fell out of the sky: that's quite a trip from anywhere especially in what, I would assume would have been, some type of little boat or raft. BUT THEN the below dawned on me!

The concept or idea of "continental drift" and which I'd forgotten about. Assuming there's truth to the hypothesis: it would explain a hell of a lot let's face it.

Continental drift - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And not sure where this all fits in: but there have been fossils found in rock and on the sides of mountains (for example), many thousands of metres up, and that could only have originated from the sea (apparently)? And which predate fossils of so-called modern man and by a L-O-N-G time to boot.

I dunno what happened here. Be nice to have the definitive answers though that's for sure.

 

[Burnt Offerings]

The continents were more-or-less in their present location during the Pleistocene, i.e. when ancient and modern humans did their worldwide hike (or, in the case of the ancestors of the Aborigines, swim/paddle)

EDIT: Sea levels were substantially lower, though, as I previously mentioned, but I don't think it was ever possible to walk from S.E. Asia to Australia...there were large expanses of land from that period since sunk below the sea...Sundaland in S.E. Asia, Doggerland in Europe, and of course Beringia. It makes me sad to think of all that interesting archeological evidence, never to be discovered!

Sundaland - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Gormur]

It's frustrating how people who don't understand science think of it as like a religion, it's not.

The whole point of science is that it's just the use of reasoning, it's just a set of principles used to try and study the observable world in an accurate, reliable way.

Anything that science has to say is by definition something that can be rechecked by other scientists. It's an ever evolving pursuit of further understanding.

If you think science requires faith, I submit you don't appreciate what science actually is. It's not scientific if it requires faith alone.

The only part of science that requires any faith is faith that the principles of science work to establish understanding.

And you can establish that you have correct understanding if you can use that understanding to do things.

Scientific understanding has brought about so much good, saved so many lives, allowed us to achieve what once seemed impossible.

So you can see that the scientific method is effective in establishing understanding.

Religious faith is completely separate and has virtually no overlap other than that what many religious texts reach isn't in line with observations of the world.

Tell that to the Creationist scientists like the ones who came to my school to disprove Evolution with attempts to disprove carbon dating, but I know there's no shortage of these individuals as I don't doubt there isn't a shortage of atheistic scientists with a split between those who accept the Big Bang theory and those who don't. Before you react (if you care to), it seems like everybody scientist or not has an opinion on where humans started out. I really don't so it simply piques my curiosity to read all this

For all I know, the Big Bang occurred when Pangaea split into different land formations and islands started showing up. I don't have a frame of reference for believing anything I can't verify but I still think it's interesting to consider that humans started out in Africa. Why there? Why not Russia?

 

[Burnt Offerings]

Because the oldest fossil evidence comes from Africa

 

[Gormur]

Because the oldest fossil evidence comes from Africa

How does one verify that these are true fossils though? Like I've seen proof (in quotation marks) go both ways with scientists proving/disproving transitory forms and this is how I was brought up. Where do I find the truth in all this mire? Also, why would somebody who found an extinct species assume it's a pre-human/ancestor of humans? Sorry if I sound naive. I have done a bit of reading and still don't understand especially since there's no DNA evidence to prove one thing either way