Why This Discovery Terrifies Out-of-Africa Theorists

In 1944, Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote a sentence that should have transformed the field of human evolutionary studies: “On the basis of the available data there is no reason to suppose that more than a single hominid species has existed on any time level in the Pleistocene. Particularly, the findings on Mount Carmel prove that the Neanderthal and modern types were populations of the same species rather than distinct species.”

In the 1980s, many archeologists believed that the finds represented a species in transition from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon, that they were a hybrid population, or that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were in the process of merging to form a single race. However, at the same time Dr Chris Stringer called for Neanderthals to be recognized as a separate species that evolved in parallel with modern humans, before disappearing. Now, a ground-breaking new study is suggesting that the origins of Cro-Magnons could go back 300,000 years.