The “Out of Africa” hypothesis of human origins has had going for, first of all, the comparatively large quantity of hominid fossils found on that continent, but it was also particularly acceptable politically providing huge support for the essential identity of all human races and for giving the poor long-looked-down-upon Dark Continent a new, special dignity as the Motherland of us all.

But, maybe not, too. An international team of scholars led by a Paleoanthropologist from the University of Toronto have issued a new paper, speaking heresy.

Humans and chimpanzees split from their last common ancestor several hundred thousand years earlier than believed – and this occurred in Europe, not Africa – according to an international team of scientists.

University of Toronto’s David Begun, a paleoanthropologist in the Faculty of Arts & Science, is a co-author of one of two controversial studies reported today on the pre-human remains in PLOS ONE.

“Our discovery outlines a new scenario for the beginning of human history – the findings allow us to move the human-chimpanzee split into the Mediterranean area,” Begun said. “These research findings call into question one of the most dogmatic assertions in paleoanthropology since Charles Darwin, which is that the human lineage originated in Africa.

“It is not a matter of continental bragging rights. It is critical to know where the human lineage arose so that we can reconstruct the circumstances leading to our divergence from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees. Not having this information is like having a crime without the crime scene.”

Researchers analyzed two known fossil specimens of Graecopithecus freybergi using state-of-the-art methods – a lower jaw from Greece and an upper premolar from Bulgaria – and came to the conclusion that they belong to pre-humans. Furthermore, Graecopithecus is several hundred thousand years older than the oldest potential pre-human from Africa, the six to seven-million-year-old Sahelanthropus from Chad.

Using computer tomography, they visualized the internal structures of the Graecopithecus fossils and demonstrated that the roots of premolars are widely fused. The lower jaw, nicknamed El Graeco by the scientists, has additional dental root features, suggesting that the species Graecopithecus freybergi might belong to the pre-human lineage.

“While great apes typically have two or three separate and diverging roots, the roots of Graecopithecus converge and are partially fused – a feature that is characteristic of modern humans, early humans and several pre-humans including Ardipithecus and Australopithecus,” said Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, who co-led the investigations with Nikolai Spassov from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

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Link to paper here.

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In the film “Gettysburg” (1993), Confederate Generals Armistead, Pickett, and Longstreet discuss contemporary theories of Human Evolution.