Out of Africa ……. by boat.

Anyone that is interested in Human Evolution and their populating of the earth should read the complete article that is posted on the Discovery Magazine web site.

The long accepted (by the majority) Out of Africa Theory (via the hot/dry savannahs) is now in trouble because a greater number of Evolutionary Scientists are realizing the folly in that theory.

Now I argued for months n’ months with Keith Septic about said folly but he refused to take off his “rose colored glasses” and see the evidence.

I have extracted the four (4) following paragraphs from said article as “enticers” to arouse your curiosity enough to “read it all”.

Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?

Research suggests our ancestors traveled the oceans 70,000 years ago.

(Page 1)
Until recently most researchers would have dismissed such talk of Ice Age mariners and coastal migrations. Nobody, after all, has ever unearthed an Ice Age boat or happened upon a single clear depiction of an Ice Age dugout or canoe. Nor have archaeologists found many coastal campsites dating back more than 15,000 years. So most scientists believed that Homo sapiens evolved as terrestrial hunters and gatherers and stubbornly remained so, trekking out of their African homeland by foot and spreading around the world by now-vanished land bridges. Only when the Ice Age ended 12,000 to 13,000 years ago and mammoths and other large prey vanished, archaeologists theorized, did humans systematically take up seashore living—eating shellfish, devising fishing gear, and venturing offshore in small boats.

But that picture, Erlandson and others say, is badly flawed, due to something researchers once rarely considered: the changes in sea level over time. Some 20,000 years ago, for example, ice sheets locked up much of the world’s water, lowering the oceans and laying bare vast coastal plains—attractive hunting grounds and harbors for maritime people. Today these plains lie beneath almost 400 feet of water, out of reach of all but a handful of underwater archaeologists. “So this shines a spotlight on a huge area of ignorance: what people were doing when sea level was lower than at present,” says Geoff Bailey, a coastal archaeologist at the University of York in England. “And that is especially problematic, given that sea level was low for most of prehistory.”

(Page 3)
It is even possible, say some seafaring experts, that H. sapiens spread out of Africa by watercraft 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. Until recently, most scientists assumed that our modern human ancestors migrated to Asia on foot via the Sinai Peninsula and the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. But current genetic research suggests that they took a more southerly route, crossing from the African coast of the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula and then following the coast to India. Mitochondrial DNA studies conducted by Lluís Quintana-Murci of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a team of international researchers reveal, for example, that humans migrated from East Africa to western India more than 50,000 years ago.


Twenty years ago, most archaeologists would simply have laughed at the idea of Ice Age mariners colonizing the globe. These days, as minds are opening to the possibility, Erlandson and others are beginning to receive major grants that will speed up the pace of research. “Now that people are thinking about coastal migration,” Erlandson says, “we have a truly golden opportunity.”

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jun/20-did-humans-colonize-the-world-by-boat