European human origin? Video explains errors behind this – 09/30/2023 – Darwin and God
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In recent weeks, press outlets from around the world have been highlighting the discovery of a skull from Anadoluvius turkae, an extinct primate about 9 million years old that lived in central Anatolia (present-day Turkey). The way the discovery has been described leads people to understand that the fossil would be a direct ancestor of the lineage of current human beings and would indicate that our ancestors were not African, but belonged to a group of European origin (later present in Turkish territory). .
But things are much, much more complicated than that. In truthHow do you say the scientific article itself describing the skullour friend A. turkae is a hominin, a name given to all members of the subfamily that encompasses the great African apes of the past and today (i.e., chimpanzees, bonobos and various types of gorillas), the direct ancestors of the human lineage and modern human beings .
The hypothesis defended by the authors of the article proposes that the group of hominins (Homininae, in Latin) would have spent a good part of its evolutionary history on the northern side of the Mediterranean, in Europe and the Near East, before returning to Africa when the European forests Finally, they stopped being favorable to the survival of primates. The separate trajectory of the human lineage, therefore, remains largely African for at least the last 7 million years.
The problem is that talking about a “human origin in Europe” is enough to reinforce old prejudices against Africa and make racists excited, unfortunately. That’s why I take this opportunity, here on the blog, to recommend the video by my friend and co-author, the Brazilian paleontologist Pirula, one of the main scientific voices on Brazilian YouTube. He explains in detail all the evolutionary issues surrounding the fossil and takes the opportunity to show how a lack of care with terminology and sensationalism can give rise to interpretations of the worst kind. Check it out below.
I had a small participation in the video, reflecting on the problems of scientific journalism in a context of crisis.
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