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.

Ingrid Newkirk of PETA contends that, really, “A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy.”

Newkirk’s pig=boy equivalence receives support from Phys.Org, which links a scientific blog-site listing a long series of anatomical comparisons, which it argues constitute evidence that human beings do not only descend from apes.

Dr. Eugene McCarthy is a Ph.D. geneticist who has made a career out of studying hybridization in animals. He now curates a biological information website called Macroevolution.net where he has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees. Extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence and McCarthy does not disappoint. Rather than relying on genetic sequence comparisons, he instead offers extensive anatomical comparisons, each of which may be individually assailable, but startling when taken together. Why weren’t these conclusions arrived at much sooner? McCarthy suggests it is because of an over-dependence on genetic data among biologists. He argues that humans are probably the result of multiple generations of backcrossing to chimpanzees, which in nucleotide sequence data comparisons would effectively mask any contribution from pig.

Generally speaking, interspecies hybrids—like mules, ligers (lion-tiger hybrids), or zedonks (zebra-donkey hybrids)—are less fertile than the parents that produced them. However, as McCarthy has documented in his years of research into hybrids, many crosses produce hybrids that can produce offspring themselves. The mule, he notes, is an exceptionally sterile hybrid and not representative of hybrids as a whole. When it comes time to play the old nuclear musical chairs and produce gametes, some types of hybrids do a much better job. Liger females, for example, can produce offspring in backcrosses with both lions and tigers. McCarthy also points out that fertility can be increased through successive backcrossing with one of the parents, a common technique used by breeders. In the case of chimp – pig hybridization, the “direction of the cross” would likely have been a male boar or pig (Sus scrofa) with a female chimp (Pan troglodytes), and the offspring would have been nurtured by a chimp mother among chimpanzees (shades of Tarzan!). The physical evidence for this is convincing, as you can discover for yourself with a trip over to macroevolution.net.

When I asked McCarthy if he could give a date estimate for the hybridization event, he said that there are a couple broad possibilities: (1) It might be that hybridization between pigs and apes produced the earliest hominids millions of years ago and that subsequent mating within this hybrid swarm eventually led to the various hominid types and to modern humans; (2) separate crosses between pigs and apes could have produced separate hominids (and there’s even a creepy possibility that hybridization might even still be occurring in regions where Sus and Pan still seem to come into contact, like Southern Sudan).

This latter possibility may not sound so far-fetched after you read the riveting details suggesting that the origin of the gorilla may be best explained by hybridization with the equally massive forest hog. This hog is found within the same habitat as the gorilla, and shares many uncommon physical features and habits. Furthermore, well-known hybridization effects can explain many of the fertility issues and other peculiarities of gorilla physiology.

Read the whole thing.

Via the Dish.

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In the film “Gettysburg” (1993), on the evening of July 2nd, Confederate Corps Commander James Longstreet, Divisional Commander George Pickett and his Brigade Commanders Kemper and Armistead, discuss Charles Darwin’s new scientific theory of Evolution. Personally, I think General Pickett gets the best of the argument.