One Exodus from Africa    

The Real Eve by Stephen Oppenheimer.
Merging mtDNA, Male DNA, and Archeology in tracing of human kind
Prolog to Chapter Three -- March 12, 2009

That mankind, the children of Eve exited from what is now Eritrea near the horn of Africa across the narrow south end of the then shallower Red Sea is generally conceded to have occurred and at about 80,000 years ago. What could propel a small group of people across? Usually people hollow herds. Fossil evidence suggests the people in this region were beachcombers living off the sea. Perhaps they had boats. Perhaps some surfers went on an adventure. Perhaps they were chased. By the way, we know they are not opposed to a good barbeque and ate meat when available and were not limited to shell fish and an occasional sea fish. This beachcomber discovery helps explain why these people moved along the shoreline of southern Asia -- along the coast of Aden, across the then dry Persian Gulf where some seem to have settled near the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates River before the Zagros Mountains. Others continued along the coast, ever moving as the beaches are cleared of ready food to the next good beach. Another large settlement was in the Indus River valley. Others moved on to Indochina at a time when Indonesia was connected to the Asian mainland, in fact the low water level at the time that there was dry land all the way to what is now Timor and exposed many more islands allowing the beachcombers so inclined to safely boat and seldom be out of sight of land. A longer hop to Sorong which opened the entire southern continent of New Guinea -Australia which at that time were one. The south coast of Australia, the end of their world was reached in this first advance by about 70,000 years ago.

Others continued along the coast to China. The whole subject of early man in China has yet to be told. We know that several varieties of the ancestors of modern man lived in various places and in various times over the vastness of Asia and its Oceana subcontinent and that some existed at the same time as modern man was passing through and settling in desirable areas. [list/discuss some pre-modern man, including Hobbits of Java to 1?,000 years ago.]

We now have early modern humans spread along the entire coast of Asia from Yemen to Manchuria including the peninsulas of India and Indonesia. And south to Australia. Europe is an eastern peninsula of Asia and was occupied by Nenderthal, a cousin of modern man, but not in his direct lineage. Europe was not settled until well after modern man has infiltrated Asia. There are two major theories, both to do with development of the next stage of modern man, the Cro-Magnon. One thought is that he developed in Africa from a second movement of man from Africa, this time coming north of the Red Sea settling in the near east. These people then crossed the then dry Bosporus and moved along the coast of southern Europe. The same genes are found along the north coast of Africa.
A second theory is that Cro-Magnon developed in one or the other larger populations of the Tigris-Euphrates near the Straight of Hormus or those of the Indus Valley. The author suggests there was not a second exodus out of Africa, but that Cro-Magnon might have moved up the Tigris-Euphrates valley and between the two great lakes that are now the Black and Caspian Seas into the eastern steppes of Russia. Others of that group followed south along the Eastern Mediterranean and back to Africa. The thought is that man from the southern Asia settled both coasts of the Mediterranean and the Ukraine Or, if Cro-Magnon developed in the Indus Valley, then the moved up the Indus Valley and west of the Caspian into the steppes of Kazakhstan where he developed into Mammoth Hunters while part of that group moved into Turkey, spilt again to settle all sides of the Mediterranean Note that paths of migration can move in either direction and the dating of genes is imprecise so that we cannot know [yet, 2003} which direction the various stages of development moved. Developments in deeper China cannot be ruled out as herd followers could have moved from Siberia west into Russia as well as east into America. However, the distance across Russia favor a southern origination into the Caspian area Whatever the route taken, Cro-Magnon was well established on the rich hunting lands of the Russian Steppes for 10,000 years before migrating West throughout Northern Europe. His advanced stone tools were starting to be adopted by Neanderthal before the Ice Age forced Cro-Magnon down to the peninsulas of southern Europe in pockets in Iberia, Italy and Greece. Cold adapted Neanderthal continued in the north with an older technology until the glaciers retreated and encroaching modern man rapidly spread to take his away his game or possibly his life.