Human Ancestors Originated Outside Africa

Anthropologists have been telling us for a century that we are all descended from African apes. Ever since the 1912 Piltdown Man turned out to be a fake. They seem to take great glee in saying it, as if it shows that we should identify with Africans.

Okay, I can accept that, but they ignore so much evidence to the contrary. It appears that our ancestors ten million years ago were not African at all.

Sci-Tech Daily reports:

A recent discovery of a fossilized ape from a site in Turkey, aged 8.7 million years, is challenging long-accepted ideas of human origins. This finding supports the hypothesis that the forebears of African apes and humans may have evolved in Europe and later migrated to Africa approximately 7 to 9 million years ago.

The findings establish Anadoluvius turkae as a branch of the part of the evolutionary tree that gave rise to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and humans. Although African apes today are only known from Africa, as are the earliest known humans, the study’s authors ... conclude that the ancestors of both came from Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.

Anadoluvius and other fossil apes from nearby Greece (Ouranopithecus) and Bulgaria (Graecopithecus) form a group that comes closest in many details of anatomy and ecology to the earliest known hominins, or humans. The new fossils are the best-preserved specimens of this group of early hominines and provide the strongest evidence to date that the group originated in Europe and later dispersed into Africa.

The study’s detailed analysis also reveals that the Balkan and Anatolian apes evolved from ancestors in western and central Europe. With its more comprehensive data, the research provides evidence that these other apes were also hominines which means that it is more likely that the whole group evolved and diversified in Europe, rather than the alternative scenario in which separate branches of apes earlier moved independently into Europe from Africa over the course of several million years, and then went extinct without issue.

Those were apes, but the first ancestors who were identifiably human were Neanderthals living in Europe.