Many paleoanthropologiists consider the separation of humans and apes to be approximately 8 million years ago and through mutations this primitive creature evolved to us… Homo-Sapiens. The earliest hominid ancestor was Ardipithecus Ramidus and dated to have lived 4.4 million years ago (mya) discovered in Ethiopia in 1984 when a partial bone was found by a college student and a team of anthropologists from the University of California lead by Tim D White excavated the site. A Ramidus was classified as being in the Homid genus Australopithecus (Southern Ape) the most famous being “Lucy”. 3.2 million years old Lucy was discovered by a team lead by the paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and his team, it appears that when Johanson’s team were back in camp examining their finds the Beatles hit record “Lucy in the sky with diamonds” was playing in the background so the nickname Lucy stuck.
In the last few years modern genetic and DNA processes have discovered numerous new species, many of these “Ghost” hominids were analysed from bones and teeth in existing museum collections, one of them, Denisovans, named after a cave in Siberia was analysed from just part of a finger bone and was subsequently found to have lived all over Asia before becoming extinct. Another important hominid species that became extinct are the Neanderthals, important because not only did Denisovans and Neanderthals and us Homo-Sapiens exist at the same time but we all interbreed with each other. All modern humans contain DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans but also some “ghost” species; what this confirms is that there were several migrations of related Hominoids out of Africa.
One of the first migration were hominoids that settled in Europe and Asia and mutated and evolved into Neanderthals and Denisovans. Homo-Sapiens evolved in Africa and later migrated out of Africa, to say that these movements of species were migrations gives a wrong impression, there was no determined mass migration, in each case the migrations happened over thousands of years, as people just drifted out of Africa. One of the first migrations seems to have been the ancestors of Neanderthal hominids who spread over most of Europe and after they had evolved and mutated into Neanderthals interbreed with those mutual ancestors in the east of Europe to form Denisovans who in turn emigrated all over Siberia and Asia. Meanwhile back in Africa the common ancestor slowly mutated into Homo-Sapiens who spread all over Africa before migrating to Europe where they met Neanderthal and Denisovan people. In recent years the image of Neanderthals being knuckle dragging semi apes has been exploded, modern research has found that they were intelligent and cultured with family groups and produced art forms as good as primitive Homo-Sapiens in Africa, and as Neanderthals had survived the last retreating ice age the chances that as the newcomer from warmer climes in Africa not only interbreed with them but learnt how to survive from them. According to David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School native Americans and east Asians have more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans which would suggest that Neanderthals evolved in Asia and then drifted to Europe and breed with Homo-Sapiens. Unless there are physical barriers population movement are quite common, for example some hybrid Neanderthals and Denisovans found their way back to Africa. Africans north of the Sahara desert have Neanderthal and Denisovans DNA whilst those south of the desert don’t.
So how did our ancestors migrate out of Africa, the conventional theory is that they circumvented the Mediterranean to Asia and Europe. This is a classic example of different science disciplines not talking to each other and why Darwin’s theories of evolution, Alfred Wegener’s theories on Continental drift and Alister Hardy’s theories of Aquatic ape were dismissed by other branches of science. If Palaeontologists, Archaeologists and Anthropologists had communicated with Oceanographers, Glaciologists,and Marine geologists or studied the climatic conditions during Hominid migration they would have seen that during the last glacial period lasting from 115,000 ago to 11,000 years ago sea levels would have been 400 feet (125 metres) lower, even further back during the Messinian Salinity Crisis of 5,6 million years ago, researchers at New Zealand University of Otago have discovered that the Mediterranean dried out completely leaving a bed of salt 3280 feet (1 kilometre) deep, so developing African hominins would not have to circumvent the Mediterranean, they could have just wandered over to Europe.
There have been 5 major ice ages, the one that we are still in the later stages of is referred to as the Quaternary ice age, called Quaternary because it is a subdivision of the fourth geological period. The Quaternary ice age built up to its peak about 3 million years ago, but there was not as an even reduction of the ice. Ice has advance and retreated several times, during the first million years the ice flipped every 40,000 years and from 2 million years ago it retreated and advanced every 100,000 years, and during the periods when the ice advanced sea levels dropped dramatically.
For centuries it has been accepted that America was populated by humans via the the land bridge that once existed over the Bering Strait and Alaska. From Alaska in over thousands of years they migrated south through north America to the south American continent. However, we now know that when they arrived in South America they found humans who were already there. DNA tests by David Reich and geneticists at Harvard University have discovered that native tribes in parts of Brazil are more closely related aborigines from Australia and New Guinea than native North Americans.
It is also been established that Australian aborigines are related to Asia through the Indonesian islands. When one considers that sea levels were 125 metres lower during the various ice ages, how many more Pacific islands would have existed enabling island hoping.