Out of Africa: An alternative scenario for the first human dispersal in Eurasia

Authors

  • Jordí Agustí ICREA - Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona (Spain).
  • David Lordkipanidze Georgian National Museum.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7203/metode.8.10171

Keywords:

out of Africa, Dmanisi, early Homo, sabertooth cats, Early Pleistocene, paleoclimatology

Abstract

Recent paleoanthropological evidence from the early Pleistocene site of Dmanisi in Georgia has revealed that the first hominins out of Africa were more archaic than the coeval African and Asian Homo erectus. More evidence suggests that these archaic hominins were forest dwellers rather than savannah inhabitants. Between 1.8 and 1.6 million years ago a climate crisis caused a new spread of savannah and arid zones across large parts of Africa. As a consequence, early Homo populations splitted, with some populations becoming adapted to the new ecological conditions and others following woodland areas in their regression.

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Author Biographies

Jordí Agustí, ICREA - Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona (Spain).

Research Professor at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona, Spain). As a palaeontologist, his research activity focusses on the evolution of fossil mammal communities over the last ten million years and he has published more than two hundred papers within this specialisation, most of them in international scientific journals. He has directed several European research projects, as well as palaeontological campaigns in Libya and Georgia. In the latter, he is part of the international team at the Dmanisi site. Some of his most noteworthy works are La evolución y sus metáforas (Tusquets, 1994), Mammoths, sabertooths, and hominids (Columbia University Press, 2002), Fósiles, genes y teorías (Tusquets, 2003), La gran migración (Crítica, 2011), Los primeros pobladores de Europa (RBA, 2012), Alicia en el país de la evolución (Crítica, 2013), and La sonrisa de Leonardo (RBA, 2015).

David Lordkipanidze, Georgian National Museum.

Palaeoanthropologist, director of the Georgian National Museum. He is the author of over seventy scientific papers in publications such as  Nature ,  Science ,  Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences  or  Journal of Human Evolution . He is the leader of the Dmanisi research project, where the most ancient human remains in Eurasia were discovered, and a visiting lecturer at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris (France) and at Harvard University (USA). Associate editor in  European Prehistory  (Liège, Belgium),  Archaeology ,  Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia  (Novosibirsk, Russia),  Journal of Human Evolution  (London, United Kingdom) and  L’Anthropologie  (Paris, France). He has received numerous awards, among them the Fulbright Scholarship (2002), the Georgian President’s Award (2002), the French  Ordre des Palmes académiques  (2002) and the Rolex Award for Enterprise (2004).

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Published

2018-06-05

How to Cite

Agustí, J., & Lordkipanidze, D. (2018). Out of Africa: An alternative scenario for the first human dispersal in Eurasia. Metode Science Studies Journal, (8), 99–105. https://doi.org/10.7203/metode.8.10171
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Issue

Making science: A multitude of perspectives (2018)

Section

Sapiens. In the path of the human being

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