Mulitregional vs Out of Africa

[FreeThinker]

Hmmmmmm....a breeding pair of monkeys floats over from Africa to S.A. to start the line of new world monkeys around 30 million years ago. Just an observation about odds here: if the odds were only one in a million that such an event would occur in any given year (an odds ratio I chose to illustrate this point, not necessarily the real odds) that still gives over a couple of dozen chances for such an exodus to happen. Who knows what the true odds are, but millions of years can add up to unlikely events occuring at least occasionally. After all, they had to get there somehow.

Some fat to chew on...a breeding pair is not enough to supply the genetic diversity needed for a viable population. Perhaps there was some "once in a milllion years" kind of storm that threw lots of trees (and clinging monkeys) into the South Atlantic all at once and enough got to S.A to start the whole New World line. Just speculating here with a bottle of Guinness, just speculating...

[Digit]

I've seen all sorts of dates for the opening of the Drake passage FT but the monkeys may have had as much as 30 million yrs for repeated crossings, also most smaller monkeys live in troups, so if one rafted across it's probable the whole troup or troups did.

[Forum Monk]

Am I wrong, or do you have to apply the same odds to other mammals such as big cats, buffalo, various antelope and deer, etc? That adds up to a whole floating menagerie.

[Digit]

This isn't as implausible as you might think either Monk. Check out the Sud and you'll see what I mean.

[Minimalist]

That adds up to a whole floating menagerie.

Noah's Ark?

[Digit]

No Gopher wood in the Sud Min!

[Minimalist]

Good point....where DID gophers come from?

[ravenwing5910]

That adds up to a whole floating menagerie.

Noah's Ark?

Darn it Min, I was gonna say that

[Forum Monk]

Funny as it may seem, maybe Noah's Ark was Anarctica:

Gondwana breakup (160-23 Mya)
Africa separated from Antarctica around 160 Mya, followed by India in the early Cretaceous (about 125 Mya). About 65 Mya, Antarctica (then connected to Australia) still had a tropical to subtropical climate, complete with a marsupial fauna. About 40 Mya Australia-New Guinea separated from Antarctica and the first ice began to appear. Around 23 Mya, the Drake Passage opened between Antarctica and South America resulted in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The ice spread, replacing the forests that then covered the continent. Since about 15 Mya, the continent has been mostly covered with ice.

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

Unfortunately, it was 98% ice by 4000bc so I think Graham Hancock, needs to rework his theory a little. The Piri Reis map seems to fit in the popluar concept of "balancing" the worlds land masses, if indeed it even shows anarctica.

Belief in the existence of a Terra Australis — a vast continent located in the far south of the globe to "balance" the northern lands of Europe, Asia and north Africa — had existed since Ptolemy, who suggested the idea in order to preserve symmetry of landmass in the world. Depictions of a large southern landmass were common in maps such as the early 16th century Turkish Piri Reis map. Even in the late 17th century, after explorers had found that South America and Australia were not part of "Antarctica," geographers believed that the continent was much larger than its actual size.

[Minimalist]

Hancock also cites Hapgood for a discussion of glaciers shown on Claudius Ptolemy's second century AD "Map of the North."

No one in Rome had ever seen a glacier in the north. It's quite a far cry from Alpine glaciers to glaciers that extensively covered the northern hemisphere.

Some of this stuff is mind-boggling.

[Beagle]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6518527.stm

The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonised the East, a movement that is only poorly understood by anthropologists.

Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.

This find in the Far East, and hopefully others, will really help resolve the debate between OOA and Multi-regionalists. Trinkaus doesn't give us any more physical description than this yet, such as the shape of the skull, but he probably will soon.

Much as Neandertals have traits common to modern Europeans, it will be interesting to see if this skeleton has similarities to modern Chinese.

This article was posted on most websites Monday.

[Minimalist]

According to the "Out of Africa" theory, modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved in East Africa and then spread out across the globe about 70,000 years ago, replacing earlier, or archaic, human populations, such as the Neanderthals, with very little, if any, interbreeding.

Ah, but the Toba Genetic Bottleneck theory says that they were damn near wiped out at that time but Neanderthal somehow survived for another 40,000 years!

[Beagle]

I think that discovering more evidence of early modern man in the Far East will answer a lot of questions.

[Beagle]

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0702169104v1

This morphological pattern implies that a simple spread of modern humans from Africa is unlikely.

From the John Hawks website, this gobblygook boils down to the quote above. This is regarding the recent discovery of Tianyuan Man in China.
More will be sure to come.

Unfortunately, there is no cranial vault to examine.

[Minimalist]

Why couldn't Erectus have brought monkeys on his travels? For all we know they may have eaten them.