origin of humans; a new massive analysis (Origins)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 30, 2024, 17:46 (33 days ago) @ David Turell

A study of almost every available worldwide fossil:

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/03/fossil-friday-new-dating-of-pleistocene-fossils-rewri...

"They re-dated the earliest occurrences of Homo sapiens in Africa, the Levant and Europe, and confirm that “if Apidima 1 is indeed a H. sapiens, it documents the earliest known presence of our species in Eurasia with an estimated age of about 211 thousand years, while the Misliya cave material from Israel “still represents the earliest known derived H. sapiens in the Levant” with an age of 152 thousand years”. Both dates are much earlier than the traditional Out-of-Africa scenario would predict to find.

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"...they provided an updated summary of our present understanding of human evolution, with remarkable admissions such as the “co-existence of multiple lineages (in our view, species) over the last 2 million years, with at least 4 of these persisting into the last 100,000 years”, or that studies “show that searching for deep single points of origin for lineages like H. sapiens may ultimately be a futile task.”

"However, the most important take-home message is shown in figure 85...It shows that several different alleged species of the genus Homo lived contemporary in the Pleistocene and experienced various instances of gene flow. This strongly suggests to me and some other critics of the current consensus that all these assumed species are just different populations of a single species Homo sapiens, that at best would qualify as subspecies or geographical races. I will provide a detailed argument for such reclassification in a book-length treatment of archaic Homo that is currently in preparation.

"The most recent data on human fossils and their dating do not really support an evolutionary narrative from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, but a gap between ape-like australopithecines and real humans, as well as just a very diverse human species that even featured a greater morphological and genetic diversity in the past than today. Darwin critics with a Biblical perspective may find it interesting that this would resonate quite well with population genetic models based on a first pair with designed heterozygotic diversity and a significant population bottle neck (Sanford et al. 2018, Hössjer & Gauger 2019)." (my bold)

Comment: this is Bechly from a very ID viewpoint. The references just above are ID science articles. I've reviewed the enormous study he has used for his commentary. Generally, they used advanced dating techniques to show most fossils wee older than originally dated. Note my bold. Either they are not available, or the fossil gap between Australopithecus and real humans exists as true history. Such a gap literally demands a designer, just as the Cambrian gap does.