The Last Common Ancestor of African apes and humans did not come from Africa, but from Europe.

What is it about?

It is generally accepted that humans and great apes evolved in Africa and that Australopithecus species are our African ancestors. However, recently, several independent fossil discoveries in Europe suggest that the ancestor of both the current great African apes (gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos) and humans, might have originally come from Europe. Moreover, evidence from different lines of research suggests that certain fossil African groups, such as Australopithecus and Paranthropus, might be more closely related to today's great apes than to humans. This paper proposes a new hypothesis on how the Gorilla, Pan and Homo lineages split, based on fossils, genetic data, and climate history. We suggest that a significant event, i.e., the Zanclean Megaflood, known to have refilled the Mediterranean Sea extremely rapidly (a couple of years), about 5.3 million years ago, may have cut off the migration path between Europe and Africa for a limited number of the European great apes that moved southwards, away from the worsening climatic conditions in Europe. The major group managed to escape the changing environmental conditions in Europe and to move into Africa, where they evolved into different species, including Australopithecus, that are in our view more probably ancestors of the great African apes rather than ours. On the other hand, a smaller group, the putative early human ancestors, stayed behind and remained isolated on the Arabian Peninsula during a time of extreme dryness. They could reach Africa only about 2 million years ago, when sea levels dropped again and the Arabian Peninsula reconnected to Africa. In other publications, we provide numerous examples of physiological and morphological characteristics of our bodies that can be best understood as adaptations of our direct ancestors, after the split with Pan, to a life at the coasts, associated with wading, swimming and shallow diving, and depending largely on seafood. We suggest that it was during this long period of isolation, at the borders of the Red Sea, that our ancestors developed a semi-aquatic lifestyle. This scenario is coincident with the probable time of splitting between chimpanzees and humans. Further reading: Vaneechoutte, M., F. Mansfield, S. Munro, and M. Verhaegen. 2024. Have we been barking up the wrong ancestral tree? Australopithecines are probably not our ancestors. Nature Anthropol. 2: 10007. doi:10.35534/natanthropol.2023.10007. Vaneechoutte, M., A. Kuliukas, and M. Verhaegen. 2011. Was Man more aquatic in the past? Fifty years after Alister Hardy. Waterside hypotheses of human evolution. Bentham publishers. e-book. ISBN 978-1-60805-244-8. Verhaegen, M., S. Munro, P.-F. Puech, and M. Vaneechoutte. 2011. Early hominoids: Orthograde aquarboreals in flooded forests? Pp. 67-81. In: Vaneechoutte, M., A. Kuliukas, and M. Verhaegen. 2011. Was Man more aquatic in the Past? Fifty years after Alister Hardy. Waterside hypotheses of human evolution. Bentham publishers. e-book. In press. ISBN 978-1-60805-244-8.

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Why is it important?

Pretty much a different and much more explanatory view on ape origins and human origins, based on the same data available to paleoanthropologists and biologists.

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