The
current New
Scientist contains an article Our
Asian Origins by Colin Barras which suggests that
our ancestors might have moved from Africa to Asian and then moved
back again and illustrates it with a modified classic human family tree – when evidence is rapidly accumulating that such
a view is over-simplistic.
 |
| A typical classic human family tree with no cousin links. From The Quest for Human Origins |
In order
to understand human evolution we need to get a grip on the mechanisms
– and to realise that we will never have more that a fraction of a
millionth of the information we would need to get a complete picture,
and the fragments of bones we find represent only some of the
environments our early ancestors lived, with some environments being
totally unrepresentative. Remains from different places with
different features and from different dates are given different
species names – but this does not automatically mean that the
living creatures could not have interbred, had it been possible for
them to meet.
