A Sydney-led study has found that the earliest ancestors of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) emerged in a southern African 'homeland' and thrived there for 70 thousand years.
Our species, Homo sapiens, has now spread to all parts of the world but it's generally believed that we originated in Africa by about 200,000 years ago.
The broad consensus now is that all modern humans are descended from an African population of Homo sapiens that migrated around the world but bred with local archaic populations as they did so.
Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans.
Co-lead researcher Shimona Kealy said these people probably travelled through Indonesia's northern islands, into New Guinea and then Australia, which were part of a single continent between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, when sea levels were 25-50 metres below the current level.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
The First Humans
One of the earliest known humans is Homo habilis, or “handy man,” who lived about 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa.
The real Garden Of Eden has been traced to the African nation of Botswana, according to a major study of DNA. Scientists believe our ancestral homeland is south of the Zambezi River in the country's north.
Homo erectus became the first direct human ancestor to leave Africa, and the first to display evidence of using fire. Homo habilis was likely driven to extinction more than a million years ago, as was the last Australopithecus.
It is generally held that Australian Aboriginal peoples originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia (now Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
Megafauna are large animals that roamed the Earth during the Pleistocene, 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago. In Australia, Megafauna included the huge wombat-shaped Diprotodon and giant goanna Megalania. European Megafauna included Woolly Rhinoceroses, Mammoths, Cave Lions and Cave Bears.
Australia was once part of a much larger land mass called Gondwana, which included the modern continents of Africa, South America, Antarctica and India.
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Australia was colonised about 20,000 years before humans first arrived in Europe, according to new research.
The recent African origin paradigm suggests that the anatomically modern humans outside of Africa descend from a population of Homo sapiens migrating from East Africa roughly 70–50,000 years ago and spreading along the southern coast of Asia and to Oceania by about 50,000 years ago.
Cush, Cushitic and Cushi
In the Major Prophets, the terms used to refer to Africa and Africans appear more than 180 times. Cush appears also as a geographical location.
The location of Eden is described in the Book of Genesis as the source of four tributaries. Various suggestions have been made for its location: at the head of the Persian Gulf, in southern Mesopotamia where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run into the sea; and in Armenia.
God is the One who decides who does or does not enter heaven. There's no place in the Bible that says they were saved. But there is no place in the Bible that indicates the couple was lost, either.
The first humans to leave Africa 40,000 years ago are believed to have had dark skin, which would have been advantageous in sunny climates. But humans did not uniformly develop light skin when they reached the colder regions of Europe.
Our human species, known as Homo sapiens, most likely evolved between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago. Humans are found on every continent in the world, but the reason we think our ancestors came from Africa is because of both fossil and DNA evidence.
The likely "first human", she says, was Homo erectus. These short, stocky humans were a real stayer in human evolutionary history. Estimates vary, but they're thought to have lived from around 2 million to 100,000 years ago, and were the first humans to walk out of Africa and push into Europe and Asia.
Some spoke of three races of mankind: The Caucasian race living in Europe, North Africa and West Asia, the Mongoloid race living in East Asia, Australia, and the Americas, and the Negroid race living in Africa south of the Sahara.
Here, he subdivides Homo sapiens into four races: American, European, Asiatic, and African. In this way, Linnaeus argued that Homo sapiens existed in four basic varieties, defined primarily by geography, rather than by physiological differences.
The San tribe has been living in Southern Africa for at least 30,000 years and they are believed to be not only the oldest African tribe, but quite possibly the world's most ancient race. The San have the most diverse and distinct DNA than any other indigenous African group.