Stranger in a New Land Stunning finds in the Republic of Georgia upend long-standing ideas about the
first hominids to journey out of Africa By Kate Wong
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we
started And know the place for the first time. --T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: "Little Gidding"
In an age of spacecraft and deep-sea submersibles, we take it for granted that humans are intrepid
explorers. Yet from an evolutionary perspective, the propensity to colonize is one of the
distinguishing characteristics of our kind: no other primate has ever ranged so far and wide. Humans
have not always been such cosmopolitan creatures, however. For most of the seven million years or so
over which hominids have been evolving, they remained within the confines of their birthplace,
Africa. But at some point, our ancestors began pushing out of the motherland, marking the start of a
new chapter in our family history.
It was, until recently, a chapter the fossil record had kept rather hidden from view. Based on the
available evidence--a handful of human fossils from sites in China and Java--most
paleoanthropologists concluded that the first intercontinental traveling was undertaken by an early
member of our genus known as [censored] erectus starting little more than a million years ago. Long of
limb and large of brain, H. erectus had just the sort of stride and smarts befitting a trailblazer.
Earlier hominids, H. habilis and the australopithecines among them, were mostly small-bodied, small-
brained creatures, not much bigger than a modern chimpanzee. The H. erectus build, in contrast,
presaged modern human body proportions.
Curiously, though, the first representatives of H. erectus in Africa, a group sometimes referred to
as H. ergaster, had emerged as early as 1.9 million years ago. Why the lengthy departure delay? In
explanation, researchers proposed that it was not until the advent of hand axes and other
symmetrically shaped, standardized stone tools (a sophisticated technological culture known as the
Acheulean) that H. erectus could penetrate the northern latitudes. Exactly what, if anything, these
implements could accomplish that the simple Oldowan flakes, choppers and scrapers that preceded them
could not is unknown, although perhaps they conferred a better means of butchering. In any event,
the oldest accepted traces of humans outside Africa were Acheulean stone tools from a site called
'Ubeidiya in Israel.
Brawny, brainy, armed with cutting-edge technology--this was the hominid hero Hollywood would have
cast in the role, a picture-perfect pioneer. Too perfect, it turns out. Over the past few years,
researchers working at a site called Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia have unearthed a trove of
spectacularly well preserved human fossils, stone tools and animal remains dated to around 1.75
million years ago--nearly half a million years older than the 'Ubeidiya remains. It is by
paleoanthropological standards an embarrassment of riches. No other early [censored] site in the world has
yielded such a bounty of bones, presenting scientists with an unprecedented opportunity to peer into
the life and times of our hominid forebears. The discoveries have already proved revolutionary: the
Georgian hominids are far more primitive in both anatomy and technology than expected, leaving
experts wondering not only why early humans first ventured out of Africa but how.
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Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.