Bruce R. Fenton's Blog

This piece is my critical response to the article Toba Super Eruption: More bang than an apocalyptic ash cloud? By Shaun Smillie

The original article appeared on the Daily Maverick, a South African news platform. While a number of articles have recently covered the discovery that the aftermath of the Lake Toba supervolcano 74,000 years ago, there were a few interesting details in this piece which made it stand out as worth a detailed reply. I challenge the assumptions of the investigating scientists and highlight a number of obvious solutions to anomalies in the data.

“It might have been the closest brush our species had with extinction and we have no memory of this trauma.”

The belief that Lake Toba almost brought humanity to extinction is becoming less supported, it rather seems that we already had low population levels due to a bottleneck event closer to 130,000 years ago and that the bottleneck event recorded in the non-African genome relates to the ancestral migration of only a small number of people (some estimates suggest 200 individuals) around 60,000 years ago.

“For six long years small bands of humans clung to survival as the earth froze and ash blotted out the sun. With no sunlight, most of the planet’s plant life had died off.”

Paleoclimate models suggest that the ejecta (both the dust and gas) moved rapidly to the northwest. This deadly cloud of debris enveloped the northern hemisphere of the planet bringing about the scenario described above. The climate impact would have been rather negligible for the sub-equatorial regions. This all occurred as the planet was entering a cooling phase and inevitably the supervolcano accelerated the climate shift.

“What was left were just a few thousand humans who survived in isolated pockets across southern Africa. Later, after their populations had recovered sufficiently, these pioneers headed out of Africa and repopulated the rest of the world.”

As mentioned previously it now seems there was already a low effective global population, it is hard to know how much further Toba lowered the numbers of Homo sapiens. What must be contested here is that all of these early humans were in Southern Africa, this goes against the archaeological evidence. We have pre-Toba modern human’s fossils and tools associated with our sub-species distributed across the Levant, China, Indonesia and potentially Australia (dating uncertainties). The bulk of the existing genetic and physical evidence now runs directly counters the popular consensus hypothesis that post-Toba an African founder population went on to repopulate the world beyond. I will explain this below.

“Researchers from the University of Arizona who studied sediment cores taken from Lake Malawi, believe they found no evidence of a plant die off that would have come with the six-year long nuclear winter, that is proposed to have happened in the Toba catastrophe theory.”

This only confirms what should have been assumed right from the moment the paleoclimate models revealed that only the Northern Hemisphere would have suffered a nuclear winter. It should have been no surprise to find that sub-equatorial regions were only moderately affected.

““All non-African populations have a bottleneck during this time but it is most probably due to the migration out of Africa. Toba might have added to this bottleneck – but we just don’t know,” says Geneticist Assistant Professor Carina Schlebusch, of the Uppsala University in Sweden, adding she wants to see more evidence.”

The Lake Toba eruption at 74,000 years, is so close to the time that Eurasia was [re]populated, approx 60,000 years ago, that it is easy to see how the margin of error would allow the event to be confused with the bottleneck caused by migration into Eurasia. Consider that one leading geneticist calculates that the migrating population numbered only around 200 effective individuals. Again, we should be hesitant to accept that this repopulation has its source in Africa (I am still coming to that).

 

“Archaeologists also lament that there is not enough evidence in the archaeological record to tell just what was happening at around 74,000 years ago.”

I communicated with the geologists involved in the new research and they confirmed that little useful data available on the full impact the Toba eruption had on hominins (including modern humans) living in the Northern Hemisphere. We can certainly infer that they had a bad time because by the time Eurasia was repopulated the continent was almost empty and within about 20,000 years of the migration starting there were no other hominins remaining on the continent.

““However, they then argue that this environmental impact was not significant enough to impact human populations.  I think this interpretation is unjustified because they do not present any archaeological evidence for how human populations reacted to this environmental change.  The archaeological evidence is required,” Marean says.”

This is especially relevant when we consider my above comment on the lack of any sustained efforts to understand what was happening to humans in Eurasia. We also know that humans were living in North Africa and the Levant prior to Toba, so what about these people?

The conviction that human populations were not impacted significantly is best on the invalid assumption that all Homo sapiens lived in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time of the eruption. We have archaeology placing modern humans in the Levant, Middle East, India, China, Indonesia and Australia prior to the Toba eruption. The Dali skull places archaic Homo sapiens in China 260,000 years ago, but most of the additional evidence is associated with the period 80,000 – 120,000-years ago.

“It was time when these early humans went through a bit of a renaissance. They began decorating themselves, beads, manufactured poisons and developed bow and arrows.

With these new technologies they began their long march out of Africa.”

This sudden technological and cultural change indeed advancement, should be a red flag that something else is going on here. If sub-equatorial Africa is not being impacted by the Toba event, or in a minor way only, what is the tenuous link between a perhaps a very slight cooling of the climate and such a radical shift in human culture?

It sounds almost as though somebody has arrived that had a very different culture involving body adornment, unique plant knowledge and highly advanced weaponry. This sounds like cultural diffusion, not a renaissance.

Why would these people safe in Sub-Equatorial Africa now move northwards into a cataclysmic climate and environment?

Three recent climate studies have deduced that from 73,000 – 59,000 years ago, North Africa, the Levant and the Middle East were deep in the most extreme drought yet detected in those regions. Any attempt to exit Africa by land would have been a suicide mission, and one must wonder what is the driving force that makes humans leave green pastures for barren wastelands. It is not reasonable and illogical; therefore, the default assumption should be that it did not occur and so far no solid evidence is found suggesting it did.

“In the human genetic record, this movement might explain that bottleneck.

It is known as the founder effect, where a smaller group of individuals break from a larger population, and this causes a loss in genetic variation.”

Now we come to the most important part of this discussion, analysis of the genetic record and the divergence of a founder population responsible for repopulating Eurasia. Every genetic study I have looked at dates the start of the populating of Eurasia at between 60,000 – 50,000 years ago, with a strong pull towards 55,000 years ago. I have never encountered a study that dates the divergence of the first Eurasians to anywhere around 70,000 years ago – that earlier date is always given for reasons of dogma associated with existing consensus and is not supported by DNA analysis.

We certainly do see a founder effect going on with respect to Eurasians after the migration begins 60,000 years ago, with leading geneticists suggesting as few as 200 individuals acted as the ancestors for all living Eurasian people this reduction in genetic diversity is hardly surprising. What is more surprising perhaps is the specific basal lineages associated with modern Eurasians and that they are not known to have ever been in Africa.

The haplogroups we need to look at are mtDNA HgM and HgN, as well as Y-chromosomal HgCT, because all Eurasians trace back to these, but they are understood to have never been carried by African populations. This is problematic, the workaround is to assume HgM and HgN are the results of mutations which occurred in a population of East Africans carrying the closely related HgL3 lineage.

““So the key is to look at what happens in African populations. So far it does seem that at least some African populations show at least mild bottlenecks during this time, not at all as drastic as the old theory of only few thousand humans surviving, but there seems to be something going on,” says Schlebusch.”

Here is where things get very interesting because when we look at what is happening in Africa around 73,000 years ago we see the sudden appearance of the mtDNA haplogroup L3 and Y-chromosomal haplogroup CT. They appear in East Africa first and then spread westwards and southwards over time – entirely the wrong direction for people moving out of the continent and the origin seems to be close to the Bab-el-Mandab Straits (an easy crossing in that era of low sea-level). This happens while Eurasians are almost certainly being driven to extinction by a nuclear winter. Their best hope for survival is to find a refuge south of the equator.

There is a very specific problem with the emergence of a new MtDNA lineage at the same moment as a new Y-Chromosomal lineage – the mutation rates are different by a factor of 10. There is little to no chance such new lineages would appear in the same small region at the same moment due to a mutation event.

Now when we also factor in the sudden cultural changes and appearance of new more advanced science and technology it becomes glaringly obvious we are tracking a small group of climate refugees that have fled from Eurasia (and with their poison arrows and all hell raging at their backs I am betting no hominins of any species in Africa could have stopped them).

““The only thing that is going to get us closer to understanding this is a genetic resolution, because we can’t excavate everything. It is the genes that will show us whether there was a bottleneck or not,” says Lombard.

Then we might just rediscover what was perhaps our darkest hour, that we all have but forgotten about.”

It is indeed in the genetics that we find the final revelations in this story. You will recall that scientists argue that perhaps haplogroup L3 emerged in Africa and then some of these people migrated out of the continent almost immediately (approx. 70,000 years ago) at which time their genome then spontaneously produced two new sudden mutations. This is again without any explanation and against all normal process and gives us the Eurasian basal haplogroups HgM and HgN. This assumption is based only on the fact that these two ‘new’ haplogroups very closely relate to HgL3, while HgL3 is the most divergent mtDNA lineage in Africa (very different to African lineages L1, L2, L4, L5 and L6).

So, if this very strange event really happened at all then we should see the traces of the oldest variants of Haplogroups M & N in the genome of people close to Africa, in the Middle East or Western Asia. In the most recent study that looked at this what they discovered was that the oldest variants of HgM and HgN are found on the other side of the planet within the genome of Australian Aboriginals!

This problematic finding comes on top of several others in the last two years, these include the discovery of archaeological sites in Australia in the 65,000 – 80,000-year range, the divergence of Australian DNA from any African DNA by at least 72,000 years ago. These issues created enormous anomalies, then followed the collapse of both the rapid Asian coastal migration theory and the multiple waves theory (both being desperate attempts to explain how Aboriginals could be in Australia earlier than 50,000 years ago).

The ancestors of modern Eurasians can’t be just leaving Africa close to 60,000 years ago, and then be immediately on the far side of the planet or arrive there before they left. They also can’t have left Africa before 73,000 years ago, because the appearance of HgL3 in East Africa is the only tenuous piece of data that can link the first Eurasians to Africa at all (even then as we have seen it is the weakest of threads). Recently we have seen media channels propping up the dishonest academics who are now suggesting the migration began significantly earlier than 80,000 years ago. There is not one fossil, genome or piece of climate data that can support that claim – it is no more than a band-aid being used to save face for a great many ‘Recent Out of Africa’ academics.

Keep in mind here that there is no ancient African fossil that produced DNA from which a solid link can be established, the oldest DNA sample ever recovered from an African bone is no more than 8000 years old. The recent out of Africa theory is not even based on that sample but on the DNA of 20th century Africans, with the massive assumption their ancestors were all and always in Africa (based on the fact that when the theory was founded we only had African human fossils).

The fact is that all living Eurasians can trace their lineages back to HgM and HgN, not to HgL3. The archaeological and genetic data all support repopulation of Eurasia post-Toba at 60,000 years ago, from East to West. These migrants finally reached Europe, the Levant and North Africa around 45,000 years ago. The founder population involved here was never the Africans and always the Australian Aboriginals. We now have conclusive archaeology, genetics and climate data to displace the current consensus model.

 

 

 

Ancestors of East Asians had Sexual Encounters with Two Distinct Denisovan Populations During Early Migrations Which Populated Asia.

Sex always sells in the media; perhaps then it should come as no surprise that the detection of yet another instance of ‘interspecies sex’ has made international headlines this week. Even though the couples involved in this sex have long since decomposed to dust, it has done little to lower public interest in the story.

Just a few years ago scientists investigating bone fragments at the Denisova Cave site in Siberia revealed a new human species to the world, the Denisovans. Since then we have learned that Denisovans were an ancient race, separated from our direct ancestors by over 700,000 years of evolution and that at some stage they were present in large numbers across the Asian region. Thanks to the recovery of ancient DNA and mapping of the full Denisovan genome the world also learned that Denisovans had sexual encounters with modern humans perhaps 45,000 to 50,000 years ago.

Denisovan genes are not found in all living humans today, in fact, there are two main population clusters. The East Asian genome holds 0.2% Denisovan genes while some of the indigenous people of Australasia, especially those of Papua, have a huge 5%. The discovery that Papuans carry this high level of this archaic human genetics has led a growing number of scientists to suspect the Denisovans were encountered very close to Papua, perhaps on a neighbouring island.

The newly published paper Analysis of Human Sequence Data Reveals Two Pulses of Archaic Denisovan Admixture composed by Browning et al. for the journal Cell, offers an additional and somewhat revolutionary discovery. Scientists associated with the University of Washington contrasted the genome extrapolated from the samples of Siberian Denisovan DNA against samples of DNA from numerous modern populations. The result of this exhaustive process was that the team discovered a complex relationship between the Siberian samples and Denisovan genes inherited by modern humans in Asia.

East Asians, particularly Chinese and Japanese people, carry genes that are closely related to the Siberian Denisovans and others from a more distantly related group, these others seem to be the same population responsible for the interbreeding signature detected among modern Papuans. That the ancestors of East Asians have this unique signature for two interbreeding events has caused considerable confusion as to how this came about and why no other populations evidence this interaction.

The logical deduction from this new finding is that some of the modern humans from Australasia moved up into Southeast and East Asia carrying Denisovan genes with them. Members of this group then encountered a second population of Denisovans which was closely related to the individuals uncovered at the Denisova Cave site (not necessarily living physically near to them). Interbreeding must have been on a limited scale – as evidenced by the low proportion of genes still carried today.

It may have been that the modern human group far outnumbered the Denisovans or that only a few respective individuals successfully mated as the groups passed each other on the road. Samples of DNA from the Denisova Cave site also revealed that one of the Denisovans, a young girl, carried genes from modern humans closely related to modern Papuan people confirming that the genetic traffic went both ways.

These migrants from Australasia did rather well in Asia, because today they have several million descendants. They also seem to have absorbed other human sub-species in the region, as East Asians carry the highest proportion of Neanderthal genetics of any modern population group. Indeed, modern Eat Asians have around 30% higher Neanderthal genetics than observed in the European genome. Around one-quarter of the ancient DNA that Browning found didn’t match either Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA. It could be that various so-called ‘ghost populations’ mated with early modern humans in Asia and leaving just their genes but no fossils.

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Map showing potential archaic hominin territories and possible directions of gene flow for the basal mtDNA haplogroups. This would reflect migratory movement during the post-Toba climate event in Eurasia, several millennium prior to the repopulating of the continent 60Kya.

How does this fit with Out of Africa?

The trouble with all this information is that it does not fit at all well with the migration model most scientists support, the Recent Out of Africa Hypothesis. Geneticists calculate that the populating of Eurasia happened between 60,000 to 45,000 years ago, with Europe reached last. Researchers often assume that modern humans encountered Neanderthals in the Middle East and then met Denisovans somewhere in Central Asia. These acquired genes should then have been common among early Asians, some of whom would also go on to be the ancestors of Europeans and the ancestors of Australasian Aboriginal populations. Bizarrely we see that after some East Asians doubled back on themselves and moved westwards towards Africa, assumedly passing through Denisovan and Neanderthal territories, they lost all of their Denisovan genes and much of their acquired Neanderthal DNA.

The story of the European ancestors with their loss of archaic genes and choice of a peculiar elongated migration route (having already passed Europe on route to Asia) is strange enough, but when we consider the Australasians things begin to decide seriously whacky. Even though genetic models keep on confirming that ancestral Eurasians separated from their assumed African source population sometime after 60,000 years ago, gradually expanding eastwards, archaeology places modern humans in Australasia no less than 65,000 years ago. Australia is almost right at the end of the migration routes from Africa; only America is positioned further to the east.

To incorporate the latest discoveries into the consensus models, we are asked to believe that ancestral Australian Aboriginals arrived on their continent before their ancestors even left Africa. The ancestors of Aboriginals are shared with modern East Asians, yet the two populations carry wildly different levels of archaic genes. Further to this, the only way to make sense of East Asians having genes from the Southern Denisovans seems to require Aboriginals sailing down through Indonesia to acquire them. After several generations of mixing with Denisovans, some of the descendants then made the extremely difficult voyage back to mainland Asia and mixed extensively with other modern humans living there.

Occam’s Razor – Simple is Superior

There is a common principle in modern science which tends to guide the methodology in research, Occam’s Razor, attributed to the 14th-century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. Occam’s principle states that “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”

Today scientists have rephrased the wording of Occam’s principle, “when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.”

Out of Australia vs Out of Africa

Unknown to many readers there is indeed a competing theory on the matter of the populating of Eurasia. This second model explains all aspects of the populating of Eurasia, that is to say, that it fits every last piece of evidence we have available, and it is also far simpler than the Out of Africa Theory.

Knowing that we have modern humans living in Australia earlier than 60,000 years ago, we can start the migrations into Eurasia from that continent without any need for new archaeological discoveries; foundational migrations occurred between 60,000 to 45,000 years ago. We can imagine that as one wave of migrants moved out of Australia, they encountered Southern Denisovans living in the north or perhaps on a neighbouring island. These explorers then headed north towards East Asia were they gradually expanded their range. The modern humans absorbed local remnant populations of Neanderthals, Denisovans and other hominins. The descendants of this group make up the greater part of today’s Asian populations.

We can then imagine a separate wave of migrants left Australia from the North Coast, island hopping their way towards Southeast Asia without passing through Denisovan territories situated on the islands to their east or on Papua (which was then part of continental Australia). Once these wanderers reached mainland Asia, they moved west through coastal South Asia and then gradually made their way towards the Middle East. Around 45,000 years ago descendants of this group moved through Western Asia and then entered Europe and North Africa.

The above is a very simplified summary of a fully formed scientific theory which has been in print since April 2017. The model is not only simple and elegant, but it is a far superior to the existing hypothesis as it matches all of the physical archaeology and the extensive body of genetic research.

The only problem with the Out of Australia and Into Africa Theory is that it requires an uncomfortable paradigm displacement. There are now a great many leading scientists aware of this superior scientific model. Sadly, scientists are proving heavily resistant to debating this competing model in public. It is for that reason you do not hear about it from prominent academics and that the mainstream media is completely unaware of its existence.

 

A Global Aboriginal  Australian Culture?

The Proof at Göbekli Tepe (Originally published in New Dawn Magazine, July 2017)

 

By BRUCE FENTON
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Images of Göbekli Tepe. top: Beginning stages of the archaeological dig plus location map. middle: Aerial view. above: Researcher Alistair Coombs standing next to one of the massive T-shaped stone pillars.

Scientists and independent researchers have publicly speculated on the purpose of the mysterious Göbekli Tepe megalithic complex in southern Turkey. The question that the experts seem unable to address is the identity of the builders. Having completed an in-depth investigation of human origins and early migrations, it is now appropriate to reveal my extraordinary findings – Göbekli Tepe is the product of Aboriginal Australian culture. The identification of the builders will likely be considered very controversial, as it should because this represents a major paradigm shift.      Göbekli Tepe is the largest well-dated megalithic complex of the pre-pottery period. There may be other megalithic sites of greater antiquity, but none matches the complexity, scale and advanced knowledge revealed at this site.

In 1994, Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute began excavations at a Neolithic hill site in what is today southern Turkey (formerly Armenia). Beneath the hill was the most extraordinary archaeological site yet uncovered, remarkable for both its immense size and incredible antiquity. Göbekli Tepe is an arrangement of at least two hundred T-shaped stone pillars of up to 6 metres in height and 22 tonnes in weight. The pillars are covered with imagery. The recognised boundaries of the complex include over 22 acres of land.1 The physical aspects of the Göbekli Tepe archaeological site are quite amazing, but its dating astonished researchers. The pillars of Göbekli Tepe have stood for at least 12,000 years, 10,000 of those underneath a huge pile of soil deliberately placed over them.

Göbekli Tepe is not some lone anomalous site, existing outside a greater context. Archaeologists recognise around 40 archaeological sites sharing the cultural signature observed at Göbekli Tepe. These discoveries cover a vast area within the Mesopotamian region. Scientists have also identified a correlation between the distribution of ancient sites and the presence of wheatgrasses.

There has been significant debate on the purpose of the Göbekli Tepe constructions. Mainstream academics tend to suggest it was a ceremonial site. The plethora of stylised animals on the pillars, alongside many anthropomorphic beings, is certainly reminiscent of known shamanistic traditions. The strongest argument put forward by the academics is that a form of ‘bird shamanism’ was observed by the local culture. Some members of the Göbekli Tepe research team have gone as far as to speculate that crane dances may have been performed there.2

Images of Göbekli Tepe.  top: Beginning stages of the archaeological dig plus location map.  middle: Aerial view.  above: Researcher Alistair Coombs standing next to one of the massive T-shaped stone pillars.

Leading voices in the independent and alternative archaeological research community have offered their opinions on Göbekli Tepe. In his recent book Gobekli Tepe Genesis of the Gods: The Temple of the Watchers and the Discovery of Eden, Andrew Collins finds agreement with the proposed bird-shamanism link. Collins connects biblical tales to the site, including the ‘Garden of Eden’ and the mysterious ‘Watchers’. His work also suggests that a pre-historic Polish population, the Swiderian culture, might be the builders.     In his bestselling book Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization, Graham Hancock gives significant space to an analysis of Göbekli Tepe. Hancock details a possible astronomical interpretation of animal symbols on pillar 43, suggesting these images represent recognisable constellations. Pillar 43 is regarded in his work as a snapshot of the sky at the time of a cometary impact event.

Dr. Robert M. Schoch, an associate professor at the College of General Studies, Boston University, briefly discusses Göbekli Tepe in his book, Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in our Past and Future. Dr. Schoch is well-known for his attribution of the Egyptian Sphinx to a lost civilisation that existed around 9,000 years ago. Göbekli Tepe offers support for Schoch’s existing hypothesis that a megalithic culture existed during the pre-pottery period. He suspects that the deliberate burial of Göbekli Tepe followed the onset of cataclysmic solar storms.

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These three heavyweights all agree the site was at least in some significant part an astronomical observatory and that it offers compelling evidence for an advanced civilisation that fell foul to a forgotten catastrophic event. They also see obvious links between the dating of Göbekli Tepe and the Younger Dryas climate events. Briefly, the Younger Dryas period is marked by sudden intense cooling 12,800 years ago followed by equally sudden and intense warming 11,500 years ago. Archaeological evidence suggests that at both ends of the Younger Dryas global cataclysms occurred that led to mass extinctions.

Certainly, the megalithic builders responsible for Göbekli Tepe lived through the collapse of their civilisation and decided to bury their work. It is evident their culture went into rapid retreat, and today it only remains in the region of origination – Australasia.      The stones of Göbekli Tepe speak, but only if one knows their language. These mighty megaliths bear the signature of the Australian Aboriginal traditions from which they emerged. The fingerprints of this culture remain across much of northern Australia, but lest anyone raise the accusation of regional cherry-picking, the focus here will be almost entirely in one area, Arnhem Land.

Arnhem land is no arbitrary selection for investigation. Situated on the closest point to the Indonesian islands, Arnhem Land was once part of lands that extended much further out into the Timor Sea and the Arafura Sea. Migrants moving towards Southeast Asia would have passed through what is now Arnhem Land.

[image error]Yingarna is a female, humanoid, personification of a rainbow serpent, one of the powerful entities from Aboriginal mythology (Dreaming Lore). The female rainbow serpent is responsible for seeding humanity across the landscape, while the male rainbow serpent is responsible for shaping much of the landscape.5 George Chaloupka, the foremost expert on the rock art of Arnhem Land, informs us that:

The belief in the Rainbow Snake, a personification of fertility, increase (richness in propagation of plants and animals) and rain, is common throughout Australia. It is a creator of human beings, having life-giving powers that send conception spirits to all the waterholes. It is responsible for regenerating rains, and also for storms and floods when it acts as an agent of punishment against those who transgress the law or upset it in any way. It swallows people in great floods and regurgitates their bones, which turn into stone, thus documenting such events.6

Until very recent historical times, all traffic was one-way, moving out of Australasia not inwards. This fact has been well established in multiple genetic studies and indicates that any truly ancient cultural elements are indigenous to Australia.3 There is also some evidence that the flooded lands of the Sahul and Sunda plates, shown in the maps on page 62, were once home to an advanced megalithic culture, eventually swallowed by the rising sea. Arnhem Land would have formed part of this lost culture’s territory and is likely to retain elements from it. This region also boasts an extensive wealth of ancient rock art, some of which dates to 45,000 years before present.4

We start with a comparison between the only female figure discovered at Göbekli Tepe, and a rock painting depicting a well-known creator being from Arnhem land, Yingarna. The likeness between these two images is immediately striking; we recognise similar posture with the same positioning of the legs and breasts, cartoonish exaggeration of the female genitalia, and clearly inhuman heads.

The belief in the Rainbow Snake, a personification of fertility, increase (richness in the propagation of plants and animals) and rain, is common throughout Australia. It is a creator of human beings, having life-giving powers that send conception spirits to all the waterholes. It is responsible for regenerating rains, and also for storms and floods when it acts as an agent of punishment against those who transgress the law or upset it in any way. It swallows people in great floods and regurgitates their bones, which turn into stone, thus documenting such events.6

In the traditions of Arnhem Land peoples, Yingarna is said to have arrived on the eastern shores of the continent, emerging from the ocean. Yingarna carried many bags with her, each containing spirit children and yam seeds. We can see these bags in a second rock art painting (see above). Note her extremely narrow and serpentine body atop which sits the same strangely shaped head we saw in the previous painting. The only facial features are two huge eyes.

Wherever Yingarna travelled, she seeded human populations, giving to each group a bag containing their culture and language. Before moving onwards, Yingarna would teach the newly founded communities how to farm yams.7

The Rainbow Serpent takes many forms, not only humanoid and serpentine but also sometimes a bizarre chimaera incorporating elements of multiple animals and plants. In the above bark painting, we see Yingarna with a feathered head, fishtail and sprouting many strange mushroom-like appendages. These strange growths are Australian yam plants with distinctive heart-shaped leaves.

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above:  Pillar56 in Enclosure H at Göbekli Tepe shows multiple large-bodied birds with long necks. These bird images are almost identical to emus represented in rock art from Arnhem Land.
above right:  Another pillar with emu-like birds.
top right:  Artist depiction (by Nobu Tamura) of Genyornis newtoni, a now extinct, large, flightless bird that lived in Australia.
right:  Two examples of Genyornis painted on 40,000-year-old Arnhem Land rock art

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If we look again at the engraving of the female figure from Göbekli Tepe, we see it has one of Yingarna’s yam leaves as her head. This parallel in iconography, across such a vast distance, is nothing short of stunning.(image credit: Ben Gunn).

 

If we return to Göbekli Tepe’s iconic pillar 43, we see this column includes depictions of both serpents and bags. Three bags are given the most prominent position of all – right at the very top. The snakes depicted on the relief sport swollen heads, making them resemble mushrooms. This is a common element of snakes engraved around the compound.

If we take a closer look at one of the serpents depicted at Göbekli Tepe, on a stone artefact (see page 63), we see the exaggerated head. It is evident the artists tried to make it clear these are not common snakes. The yam-leaf-shaped heads remind us immediately of rainbow serpent iconography. If we take a glance at the painting of Yingarna with her bags we recognise the same bulbous head with prominent eyes. If we were to add two arms to this snake engraving, and placed a few bags around the neck, we would have a perfect replication of Yingarna.  The builders of Göbekli Tepe were living during a time of global catastrophe, a significant part of which involved flooding, animal extinctions and assumedly forced relocations. With immense changes happening in their world, it may be that Göbekli Tepe represents their strenuous human effort to reverse the declining environmental situation. The images at Göbekli Tepe are mostly animals; it is tempting to think that this represented a significant effort by the shamans to call forth the spirits of the animals, many of which had become extinct. The second part of this project would have been an effort to placate spiritual beings associated with flooding, such as the rainbow serpent. Snake images are everywhere at Göbekli Tepe.  Birds are another well-represented animal form at Göbekli Tepe. At the very bottom of pillar 43 we see a large bird head attached to a very long neck, we do not see the body, but it looks rather like an emu. Large flightless birds appear elsewhere, most notably on pillar 56 where we see representations of multiple large-bodied birds with long necks. These bird images are almost identical to emus represented in rock art from Arnhem Land. These large birds may, in fact, be Genyornis, an emu-like bird that went extinct around 30,000 years ago. Similarities are evident when we look at a rock art depiction of Genyornis from a site in Australia’s Northern Territory. The emu holds a very special place in Aboriginal astronomy, associated with the dark rift of the Milky Way.

The second part of this project would have been an effort to placate spiritual beings associated with flooding, such as the rainbow serpent. Snake images are everywhere at Göbekli Tepe.  Birds are another well-represented animal form at Göbekli Tepe. At the very bottom of pillar 43 we see a large bird head attached to a very long neck, we do not see the body, but it looks rather like an emu. Large flightless birds appear elsewhere, most notably on pillar 56 where we see representations of multiple large-bodied birds with long necks. These bird images are almost identical to emus represented in rock art from Arnhem Land. These large birds may, in fact, be Genyornis, an emu-like bird that went extinct around 30,000 years ago. Similarities are evident when we look at a rock art depiction of Genyornis from a site in Australia’s Northern Territory. The emu holds a very special place in Aboriginal astronomy, associated with the dark rift of the Milky Way.8

It is especially interesting to note that pillar 56 includes an eagle grabbing a giant serpent in its talons with smaller serpents depicted beneath. In some of the many Aboriginal flood stories, it is the eagle that halts the progression of the rising seas. The flood is a punishment for human misbehaviour, and only after humans agree to correct their behaviour does the eagle step in and end the mounting cataclysm. The eagle also has a prominent role in Aboriginal astronomy, linked to both Altair and the Southern Cross.9

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It is not only at Göbekli Tepe that we find this Aboriginal Australian symbolism. Contained in the greater body of research work is a far broader picture. After the cataclysms, new sprouts of civilisation emerged from cultural seeds planted by a lost Aboriginal Australian global culture. Aboriginal Australasians have carried the hidden history of this first culture through comet impacts, solar storms and deliberate genocide. Today we owe them an enormous debt. The sacred art of Aboriginal Australians provides a final few cultural connections between the builders of Göbekli Tepe and Aboriginal Australia. In these photographs, we see an exact match between a symbol on an Aboriginal elder’s chest and one on a pillar at Göbekli Tepe (see page 65). The meaning of this is often suggested to be of two people sitting to share knowledge.  On a central pillar in enclosure D, we find a set of symbols normally reserved for the most sacred artefacts of the Australian Aboriginals, churinga stones. A modern example of a churinga stone is shown on page 65. The only difference from the symbol on the pillar is that the two lines do not merge with the central circle. Churinga stones are regarded as receptacles for spiritual energy associated with creator beings, sky heroes that came down to Earth. Incredibly, the full pillar on which this churinga symbol appears is itself described as a stylised representation of a humanoid deity. We see the mysterious being’s arms folded just above the belt (see image on page 65).10

Bruce Fenton is the author of the new e-book The Forgotten Exodus: The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution. He presents a compelling case for his new evolutionary hypothesis that Homo sapiens evolved first in Australasia, not Africa. Order through the links on his website www.brucefenton.info/ into-africa-theory/

© Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com. Permission granted to freely distribute this article for non-commercial purposes if unedited and copied in full, including this notice.

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[image error] FOOTNOTES

‘Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?’ by Andrew Curry, Smithsonian Magazine, Nov 2008
“Dances with Cranes” – Animal masquerade in Pre-Pottery Neolithic ritual, https://tepetelegrams.wordpress.com/2...
‘Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia’, Nature 544, 180–184 (13 April 2017)
‘Arnhem Land find proves to be rock art of ages’ by Caroline Herbert, ABC News, 19 Jun 2012
aboriginalartonline.com/culture/rainb...
George Chaloupka, Journey in Time: The World’s Longest Continuing Art Tradition, Reed, 1993
bluethumb.com.au/thommo-nganjmirra/Ar...
Genyornis newtoni, Australian Museum, www.australian museum.net.au/genyornis-newtoni
‘Bunjil’ by Carolyn Briggs Boonwurrung, Culture Victoria, www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/aboriginal-...- an-here-is-my-country/bunjil/
Tjurunga: Art and Religion, www.britannica.com/topic/tjurunga

 

[image error]BRUCE FENTON is an independent archaeological researcher of two decades and author of the popular e-book The Forgotten Exodus: The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution. He has previously written an article for New Dawn on his investigation of a megalithic site in Ecuador’s jungles. Bruce featured on the Science Channel as lead researcher for their expedition into the Georgian Caucasus. www.brucefenton.info

Follow on Twitter or Visit him on Facebook

On the 5th of September (2017) an article published in The Hindu rekindled debate over a question that has caused controversy in the past, the piece was titled Who were the first settlers of India? This is my response to that article, providing a rather lengthy answer to the question it posed.

The author of the report, Tony Joseph, points out that several recent research projects have produced evidence which collectively pushes back the dates for the appearance of modern humans in Australasia and Southeast Asia. India is positioned right in the middle of the purported coastal route for human migration from Africa to Australasia, and as such, it is only reasonable that Indians are left wondering whether they should also be expecting a revision to their own pre-historic history.

India can boast a remarkable and lengthy history of hominin occupation, recent discoveries in the Siwalik hills, about 300 kilometres north of New Delhi, have placed early Homo individuals in the country earlier than 2.6 million years ago. The joint Indo-French archaeological team investigating the Siwalik hills site has come under considerable pressure to vigorously defend such an early date. The project’s leaders, Mukesh Singh of the Society for Archaeological and Anthropological Research in India and Anne Dambricourt Malassé of the Institute of Human Palaeontology in Paris, both stand by their findings (Malassé, A, 2016).

Rather less controversial than the Siwalik hills research is the discovery of 1.8-million-year-old Acheulian type stone tools usually associated with Homo erectus, uncovered at the Attirampakkam dig site in Tamil Nadu. Stone tools dated between 800,000 to 10,000 years in age are found at various locations around the country. One Homo erectus skull uncovered on the banks of the Narmada River produced a date of 300,000 years in age.

It is also possible that India was the land where humans first transferred abstract thinking from within the brain to art on a cave wall. In November of 2017, The Hindu published a news story which claimed rock art at Madhya Pradesh had been accurately dated (after previous failed attempts) to between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago. The team involved was headed by two of the most highly acclaimed rock art experts, Professor Giriraj Kumar and Robert G. Bednarik. This revelation suggests India boasts the oldest rock art on the planet and by a considerable margin!

Extinct hominins in India are not the focus of Joseph’s article, the issue that interests most people is the arrival of Homo sapiens to India. The report offers us two date ranges, the more controversial is associated with an early wave of modern humans speculated to have reached the Indian subcontinent between 120,000 to 74,000 years ago. The far more widely accepted version of events, involves modern humans entering India between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago. The more recent dates range fit well with the existing consensus Out of Africa migration theories.

I would ask the question here why it is we must choose one or the other of these two options when the archaeological evidence clearly shows modern humans moving around India during both suggested periods. The real conundrum is why do we have proof of two human colonisation events if there was only one migration from Africa?

Conquest of Eurasia by a single wave of migrants is confirmed by the findings of multiple genetic studies incorporating DNA from human populations across the globe. There is no doubt that modern Eurasians stem from a migration event beginning around 65,000 years ago, a mound of peer-reviewed papers confirms this as fact. The confusion comes with the fact that there is clear evidence of modern human’s present in Eurasia much earlier than this date.

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Joseph comes close to solving this puzzle when he briefly refers to the eruption of the Lake Toba supervolcano on Sumatra, an event that has been convincingly dated to 73,600 years ago (Storey et al., 2012). The after-effects of the eruption were nothing short of cataclysmic, with the vast dust cloud bringing about a nuclear winter for the entire northern hemisphere of the planet. We know humans of various kinds were on the Eurasian continent at the time Toba erupted, and we know that when our direct ancestors arrived all that remained was small bands of Neanderthals in Western Europe and the Middle East.

The math here should be simple to calculate, archaeology places a sizeable and diverse human population on Eurasia up until 74,000 years ago, then the most powerful eruption in the last two million years occurs. Following the volcanic eruption, all that remained of the first human population was bones and stone tools. The genes of the first modern humans in Eurasia were not passed on to us only because the carriers were obliterated. This extinction event has typically been overlooked by researchers up until now, hence the continuing confusion among paleoanthropologists and evolutionary biologists.

The Hindu article brings up two incredibly important studies completed in the last few months. The first study, involving the dating of artefacts at the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Northern Australia. The team from the University of Queensland has established a minimum date for the occupation of the site at 65,000 years ago, but the scientists involved also stated that there was a 95% chance of the exact dating being earlier than 70,000 years. Several artefacts at Madjedbebe produced dates close to 80,000 years ago.

Dr Schwenninger, Head of the Luminescence Dating Laboratory at Oxford University, offered his comments on the Madjedbebe dating process. While confirming that analysis had been well carried out, Schwenninger added that “However, the results of this thorough study also seem to suggest that this [65,000 years] might be a rather conservative age estimate, and I would not at all be surprised if this date was pushed back even further in the future.”

The second revolutionary study referred to concerns the dating of teeth found in the Lida Ajer cave on Sumatra, establishing that modern humans were present in a tropical forest location sometime between 73,000 and 63,000 years ago. The investigating team included scientists from both Macquarie University and the Australian National University using new technologies to date what were in fact quite old finds. The middle point in this age range, 68,000 years, fits very well with the understood time of arrival for the ancestors of modern Eurasians. This middle of the range date also fits well with the hypothesis that modern humans were re-colonising Eurasia as the climate recovered from the effects of the Lake Toba eruption.

It should be mentioned here that modern humans living in a jungle location, in the interior of Sumatra, does not fit well with the suggesting that the first Eurasians were coast hugging people reliant on fishing. These early migrants may have then been well adapted to sustaining themselves with a tropical forest – a skill set that takes considerable time to acquire. Tropical forest environments cover much of Northern Australia and any humans moving from Australia to Sumatra would likely have knowledge of how to survive in a jungle. With archaeological evidence now placing modern humans in northern Australia over 70,000 years ago, this becomes a hyper relevant detail.

Palaeontologist, Dr Julien Louys, a key member of the Lida Ajer research team has speculated that modern humans may well have been in the region for much longer than so far established, further stating that, “it is incredibly likely we’re not sampling the very first humans in Sumatra and Australia.”

Even though the two studies highlighted here undermine the theory that a recent migration out of Africa populated Eurasia sometime between 70,000 and 60,000 years ago, other scientific findings obliterate this model entirely. I would highlight here the recent analysis of a shell midden site at Point Richie, Victoria, carried out by Dr James Bowler, professor of environmental history at the University of Melbourne. Jim Bowler is probably the most respected geochronologist in Australia.

“The shells are sitting below a very thick soil, a thick layer of calcrete. That calcrete in Australia takes at least 20,000 to 30,000 years to form. That’s sitting underneath the Tower Hill tuff at 35,000 years. So, we’ve got Tower Hill at 35,000 plus a minimum (for the calcrete) of 25,000 to 30,000 which takes you back to 70,000 for the soil evidence, 80,000 from the shell evidence … so we have come up with an age of 70,000 to 80,000 for the shells with a preference for the 80,000,” said Dr Bowler.

As much as early sites in Indonesia and on the northern coast of Australia are problematic, the presence of modern humans on Australia’s most southerly shores 80,000 years ago, can’t fit into the current consensus theory of the continents occupation. Allowing for gradual population expansion across the landmass we would expect it to require over 10,000 years for modern humans to reach Point Richie.

Let’s return to India for a moment and highlight some of the last signs of modern humans before the Toba eruption. At the Jwalapuram archaeological site in Andhra Pradesh, scientists uncovered stone tools beneath the Lake Toba ash layer, dating human inhabitants in the region around 77,000 years ago. The Jwalapuram team suspected that modern humans had been present in India at least as far back as 100,000 years ago. Whoever it was that made these stone tools the fact is that they were there 77,000 years ago, and after Lake Toba erupted their population vanished. Modern Eurasians show no sign of DNA associated with any migrations into Eurasia over 77,000 years ago.

Genes help to instruct us on the fascinating tale of Eurasian colonisation. Australasian populations are the oldest non-African grouping on the planet, they diverged away from Sub-Saharan Africans around 73,000 years ago, right around the time of the Lake Toba event (not a coincidence as you will soon understand). These earliest non-Africans, sometimes known as Proto-Australoids, carried three distinct mtDNA lineages, haplogroups M, N and R. These three genetic lineages are considered foundational for all Eurasian peoples. Conversely, these three haplogroups were not present in stone-age Africa, understood to have emerged somewhere in the Southeast of Asia. Some readers may well read that last line and wonder why it is scientists believe the colonisation of Eurasia began in Africa.

 

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Mapping the expansion of haplogroup L3 into Africa.

 

The answer to the ‘why Africa’ question emerges from deduction of the ancestry of the M, N and R haplogroups. The common ancestor of HgM, HgN, and HgR is understood to be HgL3, the latter is indeed associated with an African origin. At least, that we know HgL3 appeared in Africa quite suddenly around 70,000 years ago, not so much time after the Lake Toba eruption. Little is known on the minutiae of HgL3 origination, neither the cause or the particular location.

If we accept that HgL3 emerged first in Africa from an older African lineage, then we must accept that the colonisation of the planet started from there and not earlier than 70,000 years ago. Even with modern humans quite clearly evidenced to be in Australia at least 80,000 years ago and carrying the daughter lineages of L3, we must still somehow cram this square peg conclusion into our round hole evidence.

Not everybody in the scientific community is entirely on board with the common assumption that the presence of HgL3 in Africa 70,000 years ago makes it an African lineage. In the paper, Rethinking the Dispersal of Humans out of Africa (Groucutt et al. 2015) a fascinating possibility is raised:

“If, instead, we allow for gene flow between the ancestral African and non-African populations after an earlier initial divergence, then it is possible for L3 to have arisen during this period in one or the other population and still be found in both populations today.”

If we could find a population group anywhere on the planet beyond Africa that had been in place longer than 70,000 years and demonstrated that they carried the expected genetic lineages, we would have an incredibly compelling case for HgL3 being a non-African lineage. If we were to establish the Into Africa argument as valid, we might then wish to strengthen our case by seeking out signs of HgL3 having been carried into the continent and investigate the geological and paleoclimatic data for indications of an event that might have pushed such a population into Africa.

Tony Joseph, concludes his article with some brief pondering on the question, ‘how does one square this circle?’

Rather than repeat here the two possible answers proffered to us in the news piece, neither of which I agree with, I will offer you my own feeble attempt at a logical explanation which fits all of the known evidence and ties up every loose end.

It is my suggestion that by 74,000 years ago hominins of various types, including several Homo sapiens subspecies, covered much of Eurasia. These populations were also apparently rather partial to each other, leaving a trail of skeletons with hybrid morphology and genomes evidencing multiple interbreeding events – long before the ancestors of modern Eurasians reached the continent. Then the worst happened, 73,600 years ago the sky fell, a nuclear winter set in and rudely shunted the Eurasian population straight towards extinction.

In the centuries that followed the Lake Toba event, Denisovans were eradicated everywhere outside of New Guinea, and Neanderthals in Asia vanished entirely. A few small groups of Neanderthals survived in western Europe and the Middle East. The modern humans living in Eurasia were wiped out almost to the last person, we now know that a small group made their way to New Guinea where 2% of the local inhabitant’s genome has been attributed to these most ancient people. Far to the west of Eurasia another small group of humans outran the end of their people by desperately crossing the short expanse of water known now as the Bab-el-Mandab Straights. These, almost certainly Proto-Australoid, refugees brought with them something not previously seen in Africa, the haplogroup L3 lineage.

It is well accepted that HgL3 appeared suddenly in East Africa around the area of the Bab-el-Mandab Straights, one of the two easy access routes into, and out of, the continent. Mapping of the expansion of HgL3 in Africa shows us that this haplogroup was gradually carried from East Africa into Central Africa – a westward expansion as would be expected with an incoming migration. These incoming people would have inevitably merged with the other modern human population living safely in Subequatorial Africa, beyond the effects of the Lake Toba eruption. The descendants of these two ancient populations are modern Sub-Saharan Africans, the KhoiSan and Pygmy peoples.

Several millennia after the Lake Toba eruption, the climate began to recover, and some small number of survivors (estimated at around 200 individuals) moved north from their subequatorial safe zone. These intrepid explorers boarded their canoes and rafts and made their way from the tropical coastlines of Northern Australia up through Indonesia to mainland Southeast Asia. So, began the recolonisation of Eurasia around 65,000 years ago.

The Africans had been effectively constrained within their continent from 73,000 until 59,000 years ago by what has been described by leading climate scientist, Axel Timmerman, as being one of the most extended drought periods in northern Africa, Saudi Arabia, and the eastern Mediterranean in the last 125,000 years. Timmerman’s research (Timmermann, A & Friedrich, T, 2016) leaves him in little doubt about an out of Africa migration at the time usually suggested by academics, “Walking into the Arabian Peninsula around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago,” he remarks, “would have been a bad choice.”

It is time for scientists to start talking about the Out of Australasia and Into Africa theory of human origins.

 

Bruce Fenton is an ancient mysteries and human origins researcher currently based in Australia. He is the author of the book The Forgotten Exodus – The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Recent Studies Sound the Death Knell for Out of Africa Theory

Genomic research at the Sima de los Huesos archaeological site and analysis of European fossils has invalidated the only Potential African hominin ancestor for Modern Humans, Homo heidelbergensis.

10/04/2017 Sydney, NSW, Australia

What happens when paleoanthropologists discover that their only candidate for a human ancestor in Africa is shown to be invalid by both genetic investigations and comparative fossil studies?

We might imagine that the collapse of a scientific paradigm would bring with it lots of noise, but judging by the lack of any media furor I think it is safe to say, ‘not much happens’ because this is exactly the situation. Analysis of both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from hominin fossils uncovered at the Sima de los Huesos site in Spain, headed by Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has revealed a far deeper split between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis than had ever been considered (potentially over 700Kya). With this one revolutionary finding from Spain, announced by Meyer, came to the end of an era in human evolutionary theories.

With the dismissal of all known candidates, modern humans lacked any potential hominin ancestor. Before 2016 ended, paleoanthropologist Maria Martinón-Torres of University College London, announced that “we should now be looking for a population that lived around 700,000 to 900,000 years ago.” The statement issued by Martinón-Torres left the scientific world with an enormous conundrum. If our ancestors were not living in Europe or Africa, where else could we look for them?

“In 1982, Alan Wilson and Rebecca Cann, two of the most renowned evolutionary scientists of the modern age, discovered compelling evidence for an Australasian genesis of modern humans. They failed to publish these conclusions, but the facts remained,” claims Bruce Fenton, author of a controversial new book titled The Forgotten Exodus: The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution. Fenton adds that “My research colleagues and I, have uncovered overwhelming evidence that puts the first Homo sapiens in Australasia, and not only them but several other advanced hominin forms.”

It would be easy to dismiss Fenton and his collaborators out of hand, if not for the fact that his book’s perturbing claims are so well referenced. Could it be that the year 2016 genuinely marks the death of the Out of Africa paradigm?

Bruce Fenton is a British investigative researcher of 25 years, currently based in Australia. His investigations have been featured on the Science Channel and covered by the UK Telegraph.

The Forgotten Exodus: The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution is a short and fact-filled e-book packed with astonishing scientific information that erases the Out of Africa model and fills the gap with human evolution in Australasia and colonization of the planet from there.

www.brucefenton.info

bruce@brucefenton.info

https://www.facebook.com/Bruce.R.Fenton

Click here to grab your copy of this paradigm-displacing e-book

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We have all heard stories about mysterious men (and it is nearly always men) that wandered around the world gifting a new culture to those they met. Some stories have it that there was just one man, other stories speak of a small group of wisdom bearers. These people brought language, writing, new tools, farming and an entire culture shift wherever they arrived. Most of the stories date the events to no more than 6000 years ago, usually within a couple of thousand years of that period, the time in which the first known civilisations arose.

We know today that there was civilisation earlier than 6000 years ago. The Gobekli Tepe megalithic site in modern Turkey dates to around 11,500 years ago, as does the Sphinx in Egypt and several sites discovered beneath the waves. I have personally investigated a megalithic site linked to this early period, in the jungles of Ecuador. Could it really be that the wisdom of these lost civilisations was carried forwards by a small group of people acting as a living repository for a lost wisdom?

My friend, English researcher Leonard Farra, has collected together the stories of some of these mysterious wandering civilizers of men, respected as culture heroes. A few examples are presented here:

Sumerian – Enki

Dogon – Lebe

Chinese – Tai-Ko Fe-Kee

Aztec – Quetzalcoatl

Muiscas – Bochica

There are a great many more of these figures from across the globe and I recommend reading Leonard Farra’s series of books, they offer much more on this story and give context to why 5000 years ago was an important era involving a rebirth of civilisation across the globe. Here I would like to present the first solid evidence from a research project that these stories are based on a very real phenomenon. In the video offered here, Professor Eske Willerslev, speak on behalf a recent project that carried out analysis of Australian Aboriginal DNA. Among the revelations, all of which are interesting, the team discovered traces of a small group of people, perhaps just “two men” that wandered through Australia somewhere around 5000 years ago (6 – 4Kya) gifting everybody a new language, new tool technology and a new culture. Almost the entire continent converted to this new system along with its Pama–Nyungan language.

Professor Eske Willerslev articulates the general confusion of academics on this matter, it simply makes no sense based on everything they understand. Scientists know that Aboriginal Australians had been on their land for at least fifty thousand years (the real number has six figures) and as such had their own diverse languages and cultures spread across the enormous continent. Why would these people simply abandon thousands of years of cultural identity and readily embrace the instructions for a new way of living presented to them by a handful of strangers that arrived on their land?

Pama-Nyungan languages are represented by the sand colour, the mustard colour represents languages with, possible, relationship to Pama-Nyungan.

There is no sign of any accompanied invasion, no obvious evidence of anything that usually accompanies the sudden adoption of new culture and language. Instead, the evidence suggests that each tribe visited recognised that these strangers were to be respected and listened to, acknowledging them as being bearers of a teaching that was important and best to accept. There must have been something about these wisdom bearers that allowed such ready capitulation, I would suggest they carried something that allowed them to be identified as high-degree teachers with an ancestral link to the continent. It is my view that these were of a lineage that survived the catastrophe at the end of the last glacial maximum, they were the children of the builders of Gobekli Tepe, a line of Australian Aboriginals that had once founded a global civilisation. Perhaps the children of Sahul had returned, bearing great gifts for their ancient family?

To follow the ongoing revelations emerging from my research work, please consider subscribing to my newsletter and blog.

Sources

The genetic history of Aboriginal Australians – Natural History Museum of Denmark (YouTube)

Why Australia is home to one of the largest language families in the world – Sciencemag.org

Pama-Nyungan Expansion – Bellwood’s Account – alwestmeditates.blogspot.com.au

The World in Upheaval – 3000 B.C.E. – blog.world-mysteries.com

Australian Languages – languagesgulper.com

Australian Aboriginal languages – Wikipedia

Backtracking to Babel: The Chronology of Pama-Nyungan Expansion in Australia – JSTOR.org

 

Bruce Fenton is an ancient mysteries and human origins researcher currently based in Australia. He is the author of the book The Forgotten Exodus – The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution.

 

Representation of fish-man Oannes, Olmec anthropomorphic figure accompanied by an eagle-headed serpent, and the eagle-man Dagon. Each anthropomorphic figure clutches his bag. Note that the Olmec serpents head is a replication of the eagle head from Mesopotamia.

Sumerian handbags, Olmec handbags, Maori handbags, Egyptian handbags, Indian handbags and handbags at Gobekli Tepe, in rock art from the Americas and Australia. Members of the archaeological research community have been left scratching their heads.

Ask a dozen researchers their thoughts on these mysterious ancient handbags, and you may very well receive twelve different theories. Perhaps the most widespread claim reported by independent news websites and ancient mysteries blogs is the suggestion that these bags are connected with alien visitors in some way. It is especially common to see these objects linked to the work of Zecharia Sitchin and his ancient alien Anunnaki visitors theory. Could these bags be some alien technology? Breathing equipment even? Advanced medicine perhaps?

As far out as some of these claims may sound, it might be they hold a seed of truth. To really understand these bags requires a journey to the remote past and consideration of the very oldest representations, these being at the 12,000-year-old site of Gobekli Tepe as well as in stone-age rock at sites including Coso rock art district (China Lake, USA), where some images are over 10,000 years old, and across Arnhem Land (Northern Territory, Australia) with images from over 15,000 years into the past. We will come back to this most ancient set of sources in a few moments.

Coso rock art district, USA, engravings of multiple bags.
(Image credit: Stephen Bodio)

 

Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe prominently depicts birds, scorpion, serpents and bags among other symbols.
(Image source: Vincent J. Musi)

In Mesopotamia, the region where most of the relevant images are known, there are recorded legends of a heroic bringer of civilisation to humanity, a being known as Adapa, Dagon or Oannes. This mythical figure is portrayed in several forms, a fish-tailed man, an eagle-headed man or a winged man, always carrying a bag in one hand.  The strange deity was considered the founder of civilisation, emerging from the waters of the Persian Gulf and bringing with him the knowledge of writing, art and sciences. This strange figure was not alone, rather he was said to be the leader of the seven sages known as the apkallu/abgal, all of whom were fish-men tasked with bringing civilisation to the Earth by the god Ea/Enki. This legend is at least 4500 years old at least, but the root is of an unknown age consider that geographically speaking the ancient site of Gobekli Tepe also lays in the region of Mesopotamia.

 

Mother goddess squatting to give birth, engraved at Gobekli Tepe.
(Image credit: Santha Faiia)

Gobekli Tepe is an astonishing megalithic construction project, the site is truly enormous, covering at least 22 acres and incorporating several dozens of, very large, rings of T-shaped megalithic constructions. One of the most well-publicised images from this site is a certain pillar decorated by spectacular engravings, mostly of animal forms. It is on this pillar that we find a row of three handbags, amongst the animals, largely birds, we also find three that should be noted here, two are serpents and the other a scorpion. In a different area of the site is another important engraving of a female figure in a squatting position (likely giving birth) but with a most peculiar mushroom-ic head. This is interpreted as a representation of the creative Earth goddess.

 

Yinganna the creation mother, a female, humanoid, aspect of the Rainbow Serpent as represented in Injalak rock art. She carries with her many sacred bags.
(Image credit: Moyra Le Blanc Smith)

Now meet Creation Mother, or Yinganna, considered by the Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land to be an incarnation of the earth mother energy and an aspect, or immediate relative of, the Rainbow Serpent. In the story of Yinganna we find many overlaps with the more recent Mesopotamian story, she came from the East after emerging from the sea. With her, she carried many bags, each one carried the seeds of creation for a specific people, also their language and cultural identity. As Yinganna roamed she created the first people and gave to them language, agriculture (farming of yams is often singled out) and other key knowledge. Each people, or cultural group, had their own bag. Yinganna is represented as neither human or animal (anthropomorphic), and sometimes even incorporates lotus flowers and yams into her form, whether she be primarily in her snake form or human shape.

Across the many nations of ancient Australia, there was always a local version of the Rainbow Serpent and Earth mother tradition, although it varies the core almost always overlaps, as does the symbolism. Bags are a feature of the rock art across the continent. There is little doubt that this legend is one of the most ancient amongst a cultural background that goes back many tens of thousands of years (at the very least). In this matriarchal landscape rather than being associated with 7 male sages, the association is with 7 females, a group of sisters that came to Earth from the Pleiades to help in the creation process of human beings – the legendary Pleiadian sky heroes of the Dreaming.

If anybody is still in any doubt of the stark connections between the imagery in ancient Australia and in Mesopotamia, whether that of Sumer or of Gobekli Tepe, I will share some final proofs.

Earth mother images from Gobekli Tepe and from Arnhem Land, without profound similarity. Beneath is a more recent depiction of the creator spirit in serpent form.
(Rainbow serpent Image credit: Bardayal ‘Lofty’ Nadjamerrek)

Note in the above images the incredible similarity of the representation of the Earth mother, right down to exact posture, breast positioning and exaggerated vaginal region. Consider also the strange head of the Earth mother as she is depicted at Gobekli Tepe, now examine closely the mysterious appendages of the Rainbow Serpent, as it is often depicted in the Aboriginal artwork of Arnhem Land, and observe the exact same shape. If you look closely at the image of Yinganna with her many bags, provided earlier above,  you will also recognise that she has the same ‘mushroom-shape’ for her head. These are described elsewhere as being representations of water lilies, a flower held most sacred in ancient Egypt which is yet another land with strong connections to this investigation. Speaking of Egypt, I would recommend viewing the imagery of the Rainbow Serpent arched across the sky and comparing her with the images of serpentine-bodied goddess Nut holding exactly the same position.

If you are wondering what is in those bags it is always one of two things, the seeds of life or esoteric higher knowledge

This is by no means the end of the story, there is far more to this symbolism than I have discussed, and this subject ranges far broader than I can reveal in a single article. rest assured I intend to share everything that I have learned from my deep investigations over the last many years. There are deep cosmological connections hidden in the ancient images and a forgotten re-creation of our Earth after a terrible cataclysm is also encoded. Some of you may be interested to know that there are a great deal more symbols at Gobekli Tepe which absolutely confirm an Aboriginal Australian root to the knowledge encoded there, and this should be no surprise, there was no other culture existing on our Earth when it was constructed…who else did you think built it?

Before leaving this subject area, let me share some profound words of wisdom. The following lines were deciphered from ancient glyphs on a huge megalithic construction at the Mullumbimby sacred mound site.

Mullumbimby stone circles as they once stood.
(Image credit: Richard Patterson)

Life was brought in a bag. God came in with Light from Darkness and gave man a soul and the sons of man brought in with Light became the Pillars of Heaven. He who came from on high brought life into the world.

There is currently ongoing investigations into this site based on the notes of the original investigating archaeologist, Frederic Slater, follow the story as it unfolds with the help of Steven & Evan Strong as well as Richard Patterson.

If you enjoyed this revelation and you would like to follow the rest of this journey with me, please consider subscribing and following my updates. Be prepared for the greatest series of revelations since we began to explore the history of our species. As the saying goes, “you ain’t seen nothing yet!”

Sources

Apkallu (Seven Sages) – Livius.org

Introduction to Coso Rock Art – Bradshawfoundation.com

Quetzalcóatl – The Feathered Serpent – sfu.museum

Gobeklitepe | The Oldest Temple of the World – Gobeklitepe.info

Rock Art of the Rainbow Serpent – Aboriginalartonline.com

Yingarna Dreamtime Story – kunwinjku-aboriginal-art.com

WARRAMURRUNGUNDJI – The Fertility Mother – kakadu-attractions.com

Rainbow Serpent – Wikipedia

Australia’s Stonehenge: the History of an Ancient Stone Arrangement (40 Kilometres from Mullumbimby NSW) – Forgottenorigins.com

 

Bruce Fenton is an ancient mysteries and human origins researcher currently based in Australia. He is the author of the book The Forgotten Exodus – The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution.

In September of 2016 Professor Eske Willerslev, Cambridge University, published a paper in Nature which revealed that his team had detected traces of an unknown human species in the genome of Original Australasian people. Shortly after this incredible claim, a second separate study revealed that there was indeed a missing human population evidenced in the genome of the ancient peoples of Australia and Papua. What has not been discussed is the paradigm shattering implications.

When you see the British broadsheet newspaper The Telegraph run a headline which starts with Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth you can rest assured that something incredible has happened. The media almost never refer to the immense antiquity of Australian populations in such a direct fashion, certainly not to the fact the most ancient civilisation of Earth was there. Which it was, and still is, just barely.

The Telegraph piece starts off with the standard mumbling of assumptions involving some very familiar numbers, Original Australasian people are a 50,000-year-old population, their ancestors left Africa 72,000 years ago. These assumptions almost always start any news story involving this population group, once you see those numbers you can be sure that everything which follows will be square peg discoveries hammered into the round hole of Out of Africa Theory. This article was just that, the only mumbling of discord being a remaining question as to whether Australasians are from one wave of Africans or from two.

The real meat in the piece only comes further down the page, be aware that it is, in fact, a very badly written article (apparently, the Telegraph can’t afford a proofreader), where we, at last, discover something new.

“Aboriginal Australians and Papuans met and interbred with the unknown race of humans, who may have had links with Siberian Denisovans, as they migrated out of Africa.”

If you know about recent studies involving mapping of the genome of ancient populations in Australasia, you will already know that the only place on Earth where we see evidence of a Homo sapiens and Denisovan interbreeding event, is Australasia. The exact figure for levels of Denisovan DNA inclusion seems to vary between 3-6% on average, depending on which report you read. Willerslev reveals that a further 4% of the genome comes from the newly detected human species. This latest addition would give us potentially 13% non-Homo sapiens DNA among Australasian peoples (including Neanderthal DNA already observed within the genome).

The same story was covered by many media outlets, an article on Phys.org provides much more detail of how the sequencing of the complete genetic information of 83 Aboriginal Australians, as well as 25 Papuans from New Guinea, answers a wide range of questions in anthropology studies. They remind us that previous studies have involved very small samples, in fact, one of the most interesting related studies in recent years involved a single hair (which itself revealed that Original Australasians were separate from other modern humans by over 70,000 years ago).

Despite this being a wider sample set it is also not wide enough. Every time a study in Australasia looks at a wide range of samples they find evidence of an older ancestry and more anomalies. The second study relevant here was a computer analysis of archaic hominin DNA traces. The study, led by statistical geneticist Ryan Bohlender, concluded that a portion of DNA associated with Denisovans was in fact from an unknown hominin species. This seems to offer strong support for Willerslev’s findings, though it does call into question figures given for how much of the genome is from Denisovan or ‘unknown hominins’. Bohlender suggests that what we assumed was all Denisovan DNA, was in fact from two similar hominins, distant cousins of each other.

All of this is fascinating but we see no evidence of a single scientist willing to state the obvious about these results. Almost the entire scientific community (with a few exceptions) supports the claim that Original Australasians entered their continent 50,000 years ago and became isolated there. Further to this, it is held that this was a singular event, no other human group or second population of hominins managed to cross the Wallace Line until very recent historical times. These people are therefore a frozen time capsule of African DNA. The only foreign DNA they can have is from Neanderthals, supposedly picked up as they passed through Asia.

So, correct me if I am wrong. Australasians mated with two other human species that they did not encounter in Africa, no trace of any of those races there (not even of Neanderthals) and did not encounter in Asia, where the highest traces of Denisovan are around 0.1% in East Asians. They also could not have interbred in Australasia because Homo sapiens were the only humans able to get there. Despite all this, the people of the region are unique in having significant levels of DNA from these two mysterious human populations.

Conclusion, the interbreeding event must have occurred in the ruddy twilight zone! There is not another location left for it. If we suggest anywhere else at all we might risk seeing a huge chunk of glacier break away from the mass of permafrost that is the never changing Out of Africa Theory. Rather than attempt to explain this latest anomaly the scientists will probably sit in a big circle holding hands whilst they attempt to visualise the evidence going away. It should not take our greatest minds to notice that these findings present a huge flaw in the consensus theory. Yet, bewildering as it is, the greatest minds on Earth can’t seem to see the problem at all. Will somebody please tell them the emperor is as naked as the day he was born!

The furthest we see any of these researchers go is to suggest that Homo sapiens probably encountered these other hominins ‘near Sahul’ (Australasia as it was before sea level rise). I would like them to point at a map and show me exactly how near? Was it under the sea off Bondi beach? Was it up in the clouds above Uluru rock?

The facts on the ground, the findings from genomes and all common sense, these place this ancient interbreeding in one location only, Australasia. This is the only continent where at least three species of humans were living side-by-side, long before the first African stuck a bone through his nose, oh, and by the way, that also happened first in Australia!

Sources

Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, extensive DNA study confirms – The Telegraph

Unprecedented study of Aboriginal Australians points to one shared Out of Africa migration for modern humans – Phys.org

Aboriginal Australians, Pacific Islanders carry DNA of unknown human species, research analysis suggests – abc.net.au

DNA data offer evidence of unknown extinct human relative – Science News

Clever sub-species bred with ancient Australians – Australian Geographic

Bruce Fenton is an ancient mysteries and human origins researcher based in Australia. He is author of the book The Forgotten Exodus – The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution.

Despite the discovery of a 49,000-year-old human habitation site in the northern Flinders Ranges, replete with some of the oldest bone tools known on Earth, and the additional recovery of the oldest known bone jewellery worn by modern humans, at a site in the Kimberley region, academics refuse to stop referring to a 50,000-year-old entry in Australia.

In my short lifetime, the Original Australians have seen the accepted span of their occupation of Australia lengthen considerably. In the 1970’s it was believed that this population had sailed to Australia from Asia only 20,000 years ago. The subsequent discovery of the Mungo Man fossil remains made a mockery of this claim. Dating gave a minimum age of 40,000 years, with several scientists claiming that 60,000 years’ age was more appropriate. It took a long time for the date to be accepted even at 40,000, the increase was very controversial, indeed anything involving the history of Original Australians soon becomes controversial.

As one site after another has produced evidence of a much earlier presence of humans in Australia than generally believed, the entry-date slid further back. The consensus view is currently that a first entry occurred bang on 50,000 years before the present day. Despite numerous older sites (for example Malakunanja II ), and several rogue academics stating that the dating is still way too recent, the 50,000-year date is repeated and again. The same assumed entry date appears in most published papers and, almost without exception, it is the dating referred to by journalists whenever Original Australian history is mentioned.

The latest archaeological discoveries proudly announced by researchers working at two Australian archaeological sites are no exception. Wherever we look journals and media organisations are telling us that, despite the immense ages involved, these finds change nothing about the overall migration narrative.

At the Carpenter’s Gap archaeological site, in North West Australia, we are seemingly asked to believe that one of the first people off the boat from Asia passed through Kimberly around 50,000 years ago where he/she suddenly got the idea to carve a kangaroo bone and stick it through their nose. This neat new artefact is then promptly dropped, where the one of a kind item was luckily found today. There is no mention of how long we would expect it to take for an incoming group to develop an association with local animals like the kangaroo, develop a culture which values decorative items, might gain the knowledge and skills to work with a material they have apparently ignored prior to this time (bone) and of course come to the decision that incorporating bone jewellery into their appearance has decorative or spiritual value. We are left to accept that this can all happen virtually overnight.

46000+ yr old carved bone nose piercing (Source: New Scientist).

Keep in mind that this decvorative artefact is dated as being 46,000 years old at an absolute minimum. The bone piece is very likely to be much older than the current minimum date attributed to it. As there is no evidence of such a bone carving tradition as this at a similair time in South East Asia, we certainly can’t suppose that the creator of this piece arrived with this in mind, it is then left for us to understand it as a new cultural behaviour conjured straight out of the ether. The earliest dated bone jewellery in Africa is accepted to be 15,000 years old (though bone tools have been dated as significantly older).

The cognitive dissonance increases dramatically when we consider the discoveries made at the second new archaeological site. This time we move much further to the South, into the Flinders Ranges. Among the artefacts at this second site are the oldest sharpened bone point in the country, dated at 40,000 years old, until the announcement of the nose piercing from Kimberly this bone point was, very briefly, the oldest carved bone artefact in Australia. The real problem with this site is not so much the incredible artefacts as it is the extraordinary geographical location and the early dating. This rock shelter is situated in the furthest South of the country, in a rather inhospitable area. Despite this, it is stated that humans had begun inhabiting the site by at least 49,000 years ago.

The immediate question for the rational thinking person should be, what in the heck are members of a newly arrived human population doing down there?

40,000 yr old sharpened bone tool, Flinders Ranges, South Australia (Image source: news.com.au).

It is a very long way from sites such as Kimberly  and the Northern coast of Australia, down to the Flinders Ranges. The rock shelter is around 2000km from any conceivable entry point into the Australian continent. For this very reason, the vast distance involved, it has always been stated by academics that humans arrived in Southern Australia around 20,000 years ago. These migrants would have initially stuck to the coasts, only gradually migrating South, before at last venturing inwards towards the continents harsher interior.  This model was based partly on archaeology but even more so on logic and common sense. It takes a very long time for a small archaic population to need to migrate any long distance or to multiply sufficiently so that large areas of new territory must be explored. The updated model is that 50,000 years ago, the boat pulls ashore on the Northern coast, and suddenly 1000 years later the crew have run as fast as they can down to the harsh interior near to the Southern coast. During the sprint, they have also been perfecting their divinely inspired bone working technologies.

When will the academics simply state the obvious that the dating for the occupation of this continent is wildly wrong? When will the press, stop reprinting the same old rubbish they are told by those same dishonest researchers, and instead engage their natural scepticism and critical thinking?

Any fool can see that these artefacts tell the story of an incredibly more ancient culture than the popular narrative will allow for, accompanied by desperate silent pleas for us readers to not ruin the good thing these researchers have got going. They have made their careers based on lies and fantasy and if we the public, or god forbid the press, start to question the fairy story, it is their privileged academic jobs on the line.

It takes a very long for a new culture to arise and become widespread. If you happen to find one carved bone nose piercing, on the vast continent of Australia, dated to at least 46,000 years old, knowing they would normally decay to dust in that time, logic suggests that it was a commonplace aspect of the culture around that time and you are only finding such an example because it was once very widespread. This popularity must would taken significant time to arise and it would have roots in deep unknown antiquity, going  back to well before the purported arrival date. The same type of logic must be applied to the Flinders Ranges rock shelter. We can’t reasonably accept the immediate repeal of the 20,000-year long migration period, and a replacement with a 1000-year long marathon, simply because it no longer suits those trying to prop-up the existing preferred belief system.

Academics would now like us to believe that their imaginary first people were a mob of Usain Bolt’s on steroids, jumping straight from the boat, sticking bones through their noses, and madly dashing off into the desert.

This type of nonsense passed off as science will only continue if the public refuses to question it.

Sources

Kangaroo-bone nose piercing is oldest bone jewellery ever found – New Scientist

A >46,000-year-old kangaroo bone implement from Carpenter’s Gap 1  – Science Direct

Nature calls: Toilet break leads to discovery of 49000-year-old Aboriginal site – News.com.au

Bruce Fenton is an ancient mysteries and human origins researcher based in Australia. He is author of the book The Forgotten Exodus – The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution.

Between 3 – 2 million years ago there lived a range of early human forms. At present, there are as many as a dozen or so named hominin species positioned in this time-frame. New evidence calls into question the existence of almost all of them.

Do you know you’re A. aferensis from your H. rudolfensis? If your answer to this question is no, then you might be relieved to hear that recent discoveries suggest these species, and many others, could be mere figments of researcher’s imaginations. The hominin species presently under review include Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus sediba, Homo habilis, Homo naledi and Homo rudolfensis.

Human evolution has always been a subject plagued with external controversies and internal disputes. As noted by several prominent scientists, it is virtually impossible to find two paleoanthropologists that will agree on the species attributions of every single hominin fossil discovery. In fact, many researchers will suggest that some of attributed fossil finds are not even from hominins but should be considered as ancient apes.

When the Homo habilis was first identified as the earliest member of the Homo genus, back in the early 1960’s, it shifted the entire field of human origins research from an Asia centered model to one based on an African evolution. The initial finds, and subsequent identification, were made by Louis Leakey and his team at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Though the remains were considered to have morphology suggestive of a human ancestor (advances in the jaw, teeth and hand structure) the crucial consideration in adding this find to the human family was the association of the hominin with stone tools discovered nearby. The use of worked stone tools was sufficient proof of human behavior. Consider that the very name Homo habilis means ‘handy man’.

Fossils accredited to Homo habilis stretch from 2.5 to 1.5 million years before present. Brain capacity was on average about half that of modern humans, around 610cc, although it may have ranged as high as 800cc. In many ways, this hominin was not only the earliest human ancestor, but represented the birth of an entire new field of study and the beginning of the Out of Africa Theory of human evolution.

Since that time several new species have joined the list of ancestors. Some have more evidence than others, Homo rudolfensis is an entire species existent thanks to a single skull fragment, whilst Homo naledi was identified from an entire cave crammed with fossilized bodies, at least 15 individuals among them. Identification of Homo forms has involved morphology, brain size and evidence of cultural traits, such as ritual burials as well as tool manufacturing. The problem currently manifesting is that some of the core Homo evidence, the morphological variation and the use of tools, has been found to be support a far broader inclusion of hominins, and far less separate species of them.

“A femur from a horse species was found nearby that also had similar stone tool damage, consistent with hominins dismembering and filleting the leg. As such these bones provide conclusive evidence of hominins at Bouri using stone tools 2.5 million years ago. And the only hominins we know of living at Bouri at this time is Australopithecus garhi.”- Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History

Stone tools being used by beings outside of our human family, 2.5 million years ago, is problem enough, after all, stone tools should mean inclusion into our genus. But soon after this revelation another site, near to Lake Turkana in Kenya, produced evidence of tool use that dated back to around 3.3 million years before present. That dating goes right back to the time of the first Australopithecus forms, the entire genus of at least 7 species which was considered to have preceded Homo. Surely then most of these species need to be re-classified as Homo ancestors?

A collection of hominin skulls most often attributed to a wide range of species.

The trouble does not end there. In 1999 and 2001 a collection of 1.8-million-year-old Homo erectus fossils were uncovered at Dmansi, in the Caucasus mountains of the Georgian republic, subsequently the entire field of palaeoanthropology was thrown into chaos. The first question was what why were these hominins so far from Africa, keeping in mind that African H. erectus were only dated to 1.9 million years. The worst was yet to come.

Researchers were soon blown away by the huge variation observable even among such a small collection of H. erectus skulls. Careful analysis of the five Dmansi skulls called into question the validity of several named hominin species, all those positioned on our family tree between late Australopithecus and H. erectus.

“The site of Dmanisi, Georgia, has yielded an impressive sample of hominid cranial and postcranial remains, documenting the presence of Homo outside Africa around 1.8 million years ago. Here we report on a new cranium from Dmanisi (D4500) that, together with its mandible (D2600), represents the world’s first completely preserved adult hominid skull from the early Pleistocene. D4500/D2600 combines a small braincase (546 cubic centimeters) with a large prognathic face and exhibits close morphological affinities with the earliest known Homo fossils from Africa. The Dmanisi sample, which now comprises five crania, provides direct evidence for wide morphological variation within and among early Homo paleodemes. This implies the existence of a single evolving lineage of early Homo, with phylogeographic continuity across continents.” – David Lordkipanidze, Georgian National Museum

It now appears that we need to rethink some of the very core understandings in human evolutionary research. It is starting to sound more like a singular ever evolving human form has existed for at least the better part of 4 million years, and that a dozen hominin and pre-hominin forms should be reduced to maybe three at most. This all has profound implications for how we think about the human story.

References:

Homo habilis – Encyclopedia Britannica

World’s Oldest Stone Tools Predate Humans – Live Science

3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya – Nature

A Complete Skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the Evolutionary Biology of Early Homo – Science

 

Bruce Fenton is an ancient mysteries and human origins researcher based in Australia. He is author of the book The Forgotten Exodus – The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution.