LONDON, ENGLAND, November 15, 2005: Modern humans migrated out of Africa and into India much earlier than once believed, driving older hominids in present-day India to extinction and creating some of the earliest art and architecture, a new study suggests. The research places modern humans in India tens of thousands of years before their arrival in Europe, Kazinform cites Brian Vastag for National Geographic News. University of Cambridge researchers Michael Petraglia and Hannah James developed the new theory after analyzing decades’ worth of existing fieldwork in India. They outline their research in the journal Current Anthropology. “He’s putting all the pieces together, which no one has done before,” Sheela Athreya, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University, said of Petraglia.
Modern humans arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago, leaving behind cave paintings, jewelry, and evidence that they drove the Neanderthals to extinction. Petraglia and James argue that similar events took place in India when modern humans arrived there about 70,000 years ago. The Indian subcontinent was once home to Homo heidelbergensis, a hominid species that left Africa about 800,000 years ago, Petraglia explained. “I realized that, my god, modern humans might have wiped out Homo heidelbergensis in India,” he said. “Modern humans may have been responsible for wiping out all sorts of ancestors around the world.” “Our model of India is talking about that entire wave of dispersal,” he added. “[T]hat’s a huge implication for paleoanthropology and human evolution.”
Petraglia and James’s report presents evidence of creativity and culture in India starting about 45,000 years ago. Sophisticated stone blades arrive first, along with rudimentary stone architecture. Beads, red ochre paint, ostrich shell jewelry, and perhaps even shrines to long-lost gods–the hallmarks of an early symbolic culture–appear by 28,500 years ago. This slow change is in contrast to what many scientists believe played out in Europe. Modern humans blew through the continent like a storm about 40,000 years ago, and Neanderthals quickly disappeared.