Out of Africa - Wolpoff - 1999

Humans were not forced, squeezed, or starved out of Africa. It was a matter of opportunity and the evolving human ability to take advantage of it. Necessary prerequisites evolved with the changing anatomical adaptations to diurnal activities, including large body size, long legs and a number of physiological changes, and what was at the time, sophisticated tool use. Key innovations include flakes used for cutting and dismembering, digging sticks, and containers. Yet the human approach to adaptation is and has been a social one as well as technological. The mobility-related morphological peculiarities of early H. sapiens played an important role, but their behavioural consequences took some time to emerge. It is in the organization of society, at least as much as in the evolution of technology, that we can hope to understand how the evolving human brain was the ultimate cause of that first sweep out of Africa. As humans began the colonization of the Old World tropics, they evolved a trellis of interrelationships across a broad geographical range, contrasting a centre and an edge pattern of variation.

Keywords

Homo sapiens - Technology - Human evolution

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