Humans 'left Africa much earlier' (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

Modern humans may have emerged from Africa up to 50,000 years earlier than previously thought, a study suggests.

Researchers have uncovered stone tools in the Arabian peninsula that they say were made by modern humans about 125,000 years ago.

The tools were unearthed at the site of Jebel Faya in the United Arab Emirates, a team reports in the journal Science.

The results are controversial: genetic data strongly points to an exodus from Africa 60,000-70,000 years ago.

Simon Armitage, from Royal Holloway, University of London, Hans-Peter Uerpmann, from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and colleagues, uncovered 125,000-year-old stone tools at Jebel Faya which resemble those found in East Africa at roughly the same time period.
***
more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12300228

[laconicsax]

1. Could be.

If modern humans were in the Arabian peninsula 125,000 years ago, the genetic data suggests that the ones who were don't have any living descendants.

[denbot]

2. There was a human population bottle neck around 70,000 years ago

Two likely reasons: humans that first left Africa may not have survived the Toba erutption.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

The remaining humans re-populated areas that were settled in the previous 55,000 years.

Or Pre-"human" species developed stone tool technology that was rediscoved by later hominina.

[gtar100]

3. Well, not all of them.

Just want the record to be accurate.

[Orsino]

4. We already know about modern humans living alongside Neanderthal 110k ya.

The BBC story has a glaring hole in it. The claim that these 125k ya modern humans are ancestral to living people today doesn't have a shred of evidence to support it. One can't make such an argument when one is only studying rocks.