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A lot of buzz is going around about a recent study that purports that the human-chimp split occurred in the Mediterranean—not Africa as is commonly thought (Fuss et al, 2017). This claim, however, is based off of a few teeth and jawbone with one tooth in it of a supposed hominin named Graecopithecus freybergi. A lot of wild conclusions are being jumped to about this study and these claims need to be put to rest.

On altright.com, an article was written titled Recent Discovery Shows Humans Came From Europe. The article claims that the OoA hypothesis has been “debunked by hard evidence”. Though to disprove the OoA hypothesis, a lot more will be needed than a few teeth and a jawbone. This is similar to another article on the Dailystormer, New Discovery Shows Pre-Human Hominids in Europe Before Africa, which, again, makes more wild claims.

white people are just Negroes who have lighter skin because during the Ice Age, they were wearing more clothing and thus needed lighter skin to absorb more Vitamin D. needed lighter skin to absorb more Vitamin D.

This is true.

So, the reasoning behind the theory is that we are all very close together, genetically, so there isn’t really any problem with mixing us all together, and pretty much, race is a social construct.

Race is a social construct of a biological reality. OoA is based on solid evidence. Just because ‘we are close together, genetically’, as egalitarians would say, doesn’t mean we should destroy the human diversity we currently have.

Much damage to evolutionary research was done by the Jew Stephen Jay Gould3, who argued in favor of the idea of rapid evolution

This is bullshit. Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed Puncuated Equilibria (PE). PE occurs when a species becomes as ‘adapted’ to its environment as possible and then remains in stasis. Species speciate when the environment changes (climate), or, say an earthquake occurs and splits a population of 100 peacocks in half. Fifty of the peacocks will change due to drift, natural and sexual selection. But if the environmental conditions stay the same then species cannot change.

Punctuated Equlibria is an alternative to phyletic gradualism.

What is punctuated equilibrium? What is macroevolution? A response to Pennell et al

The proposal was that after a long time in stasis that quick speciation would occur—that would be in response to the environmental change that drives the evolution of species.

He also made much damage to the field of sociobiology, literally arguing that evolution has no role in human behavior

He argued that many functions of the ‘higher’ functions of the human brain evolved for other reasons and were coopted for other reasons, which is why he coined the term ‘exaptation’.

And the debate about spandrels—which is a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of the evolution of another trait and not due to adaptive selection. There is a tendency to assume that all—or most—traits are due to adaptive selection. This is not true.

PZ Myers – Bad Biology: How Adaptationist Thinking Corrupts Science

With this new discovery of prehumans in Europe, they are dating the European fossil as older, but we would basically end up with the same conclusions with regards to rapid evolution and thus “race not existing.” So I don’t see anything for racists to get all excited about, with the way it is currently being presented.

Punctuated Equilibria is a lot more nuanced than you’re making it out to be. It’s looking at the whole entire fossil record and noticing that for most of a species’ evolutionary history that it remains in stasis and that evolution then occurs in quick bursts.

This theory postulates that Africans, Asians, Europeans and Aboriginal Australians all evolved completely separately from different hominidae

This is not tenable. This isn’t even how it works. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens are derived from Heidelbergensis.

Erectus is in our family tree beginning 2 mya. He is an origin of AMH and us as well. However, what you’re talking about needs to be proven with genetic testing.

Africans of course are more violent (and larger) not so much because of IQ, but because of higher levels of testosterone, but no one has explained what caused this.

Claims about substantially higher levels of testosterone in blacks are not true.

Then, of course, the Asians who moved north developed higher IQs and lighter skin because of climate-related reasons.

East Asians needed bigger brains for expertise capcity; not IQ. Light skin did evolve for climatic reasons; not sexual selection as some claim.

People need to 1) learn the basics of evolutionary theory; 2) learn the basics of the OoA hypothesis; 3) stop jumping to conclusions based on little evidence and large conjecture; 4) never trust anything at face value; always do more research into something and put all ideas under intense scrutiny, even ones you strongly believe. That way, articles like the ones above don’t get writtent with complete disregard for modern-day evolutionary theory.

John Hawks, paleoanthropologist writes:

Here’s what I think: Paleoanthropology must move past the point where a mandibular fragment is accepted as sufficient evidence.

He also states that this may be a case of apes evolving “supposed hominin characters” in the Miocene, citing a study by him and his colleagues showing that features that supposedly link Ardipethicus and Sahelanthropus are also found in other Miocene fossils (Wolpoff et al, 2006). Graecopithecus shares few features with Australopithecus, so Hawks says that we should begin to think about the possibility of Graecopithecus being “part of a diversity of apes that are continuous across parts of Africa and Europe.”

Finally, there is not enough evidence to back the claim that humans originated in Europe. Vertebrate paleontologist and paleobiologist Dr. Julian Benoit states that the author’s claim of the fourth molar root in Graecopithecus being similar to hominins is unfounded because “This is not a character that is conventionally used in palaeoanthropology, especially because not all hominins have similar tooth roots. This character is rather variable – and the authors go on to acknowledge this – so it’s unreliable for classification.” Further, humans aren’t the only apes with small canines and the jawbone and teeth aren’t too well preserved.

We have found thousands of hominin fossils in Africa. We know that the LCA between apes and humans existed between 6-12 mya in Africa. Graecopithecus was probably an ape species not related to humans. Even if the claim were true, it wouldn’t completely disprove the hypothesis that Man originated in Africa. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; this is not it.

People need to stop letting their biases and political beliefs get in the way of rational thought. Never take claims at face value; always look at things objectively. There needs to be a lot more evidence for the claim that Man originated in Europe; and even then, there is a mountain of evidence that anatomically modern humans arose in Africa.

In order to prove that Graecopithecus was a hominin and not another species of non-human ape, more fossils need to be found and a phylogenetic analysis needs to be done on the jawbone, comparing it with other species to see the closest relationship on the phylogeny. I assume when this is done it will show that it is related to non-human apes; not humans. Nevertheless, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and people need to stop believing and agreeing with everything that ‘agrees’ with their worldviews as a fact without taking an objective look at the data. Never trust claims and always attempt to verify that what someone claims has a basis in reality. Only ask yourself what the facts are and what they show—without bias.