S03E18 - Bruce Fenton // The Forgotten Exodus

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1:25Holler Party People It is Monday. That means it's Lost Origins Day, and I'm really excited for just the UN to pull it together. And rename Monday as Lost Origins Day, and then there's- Guys, get it together. Yep. Yep. They're not responding to my emails. Don't make priorities, people. Don't make us form a country and then petition to get a representative.

1:56Yeah. God. That's a lot of work, too, though, I'm finding. So much work. Weird. I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on in the world right now, and I get it, right? It's like there's- You stack rank the things, but- 2020 has been an early start to any given year. Yeah, a lot of things on the plate. But, you know, at least it's not 2019. True. Yeah, we have- Yeah, indeed. The future is bright. Really beautiful things going on, you know? And I will say, even, you know, not just thinking about the future, but looking way back in the past, another homie of the show that has pretty much been on the show since day one, Inner Traditions and Barron Company.

2:32Yep. Constantly helping us give context to the moment. Things are great. Yep. Things can't be that bad. And in the context of all things ancient mysteries, all things ancient history, all things alternative theory, Inner Traditions and Barron Company, if you haven't seen it yet, if you don't know what we're talking about, that's crazy talk. Yep. But for those who don't, or for those who just haven't done it yet, InnerTraditions.com, hit them up. Do it, right? It's 2020. That means it's the year of perfect vision. And if you're a fan of ancient mysteries, it means you're always trying to get the right perspective or the right outlook on things.

3:06And if you're not familiar with those guys, my challenge to you, CK's challenge to you, the show's challenge to you, would be to have Inner Traditions help you with your vision impairment. Get woke, guys. Get involved. InnerTraditions.com. So, let's talk about today's episode of the show. All right. So, I'm super excited for today's show because today we are welcoming back an old homie from season two, Bruce Fenton. And if you did not work through that episode, you may want to jump back a season.

3:37Just check that out because this guy, man, anthropologist, digs into all the things, not afraid to ask the hard questions and look at things through a different perspective. And in that conversation, we only really worked through, you know, a small sample of his body of work, right? This guy has been all over the globe. He has poked at so many different theories, concepts, controversies, ancient mysteries, all the things. And I'm really excited to get him back on the show because in our last conversation, we really worked through his book, Hybrid Human.

4:09And that's a solid, solid body of work. You should, like, we highly recommend that you check it out. But in today's conversation, we're going to be digging into one of his other books, The Forgotten Exodus, the Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution. And so it's going to be one hell of a ride. We're going to be looking at the origins of humanity, one of our favorite topics of conversation. And, you know, I'm just super, super excited because Bruce is hands down one of the nicest guys that we've had on the show. He's very thorough, very thoughtful.

4:40We've gotten tons of feedback from the audience that they really enjoy the way in which he presents his work and his research. And so I'm excited for the conversation for sure. He's kind of a fun guy. He's super fun. And, you know, there may be some controversy. Controversy. Controversy. Today. And that's going to be okay, right? Whatever. We love it. Yeah. You know, controversy, you know, that's just an opportunity for personal development and growth. And even further, if the controversy is too much for some of the people in the audience, holler back at us.

5:11Our man would love to hear back, you know, through us. He definitely, I think, seems like somebody who's pretty open to this stuff. So hopefully there's a bunch of really solid nuggets. Yeah. And in the emails leading up to this booking, he did share with me his calendar for his fight club. Nice. Yeah. So if you guys get real worked up. You did just violate the first rule of it, though. But whatever. Right. But it's not that fight club. You can edit it out. It's not a different fight club. Delete it from everyone's mind. Yeah. If you want to fight Bruce Fenton, just let us know.

5:43We can probably make that happen. Oh, Jesus. Let's just do an episode of this show, I guess. Get this guy on the horn. Don't talk about fight club.

5:59Bruce Fenton, welcome back, man. How are you doing? Very well. Thank you very much. And, yeah, it's a pleasure to be back on. Absolutely. And, you know, normally we do some introductions. But since we've had a conversation with you before, just, you know, recently, last season, we discussed your book, Hybrid Humans. And it was such a solid exchange. You learned, I know, both Andrew and I learned a lot. Super excited for today's conversation. And I know we're going to be digging into one of your other books, The Forgotten Exodus, or the Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution.

6:32But before we dive into that, and specifically the focus of that research, can you take a step back and share with the audience kind of the conventional view of the migration patterns of Homo sapiens? You know, give us a high-level overview of what most current academics would see as the understanding of that epoch. Sure. I mean, if you go back around about, let's say, about 15 million years ago or so, you've got the early ancestors of hominins. They're down, these primates, which are down in Southeast Asia, sort of monkey-like creatures, right?

7:06They migrate. There's a climate event which causes them to migrate across Eurasia and to end up in Africa. A few million years later, we have the early hominins. So, going back about 7 million, 8 million years ago, you have the first, what would seem to be recognizably hominin ancestors of our lineage. They were ape-like, right? So, they definitely weren't human. And then, it's not until about, well, about, I suppose, 3 million years ago, you have a transition towards the genus Homo.

7:39And some of the fossils of that time are considered to be transitional. You can see there's traits of both, you know, the earlier ape-like hominins and more human-like traits. And so, from then on, it's considered largely an African-centric story in which we have a progression onwards to Homo erectus, which emerges around 2 million years ago. They start to leave the continent, again, in this model, spread across Western Asia. And they make their way all the way down to Southeast Asia by around about 1.8 million years ago.

8:11So, that's what's considered to be the first big out of Africa. And then, later on in the story, we have the emergence of Homo sapiens, which is considered to occur, depending on who you ask now, this is a story in transition, but somewhere around about 500,000 to 700,000 years ago. So, we have the early origins of our lineage, supposedly, again, in Africa. And then, largely, the form evolves within the continent until there's some out-of-Africa events at around 200,000 years ago.

8:43And then, of course, the most famous one, which is at around 70,000 years ago, which is modern humans supposedly leaving East Africa, populating the rest of the world over the coming millennia. That's sort of an overview. Just a high-level overview. Just millions of years real quick. Yes, this is rabbit. You summed it up, though, like a boss. We appreciate the hell out of that. And so, I know that in several conversations that you and I have had offline, via email, on the phone, whatever, you've outlined that there's been some seriously incredible discoveries within this field since your book was released.

9:15And that's really where we want to spend the majority of our time in today's conversation. So, before we explore those concepts and discoveries specifically, maybe provide us with a little bit of overview or context around the forgotten exodus, right? We really want to make sure that we're setting the stage here. What are some of the key takeaways for our audience who have not read that book or maybe some of the high-level overviews of just the theories in general that you guys are putting forth in that body of work? Sure. I mean, one of the major, I guess, divergence points from the conventional story that are tackled in the book is the idea that Homo erectus was, of course, is already recognized as being outside of Africa at least around 1.8 million years ago.

9:58But it's possible that maybe an earlier, but either way, what we have is this hominin who is considered to be likely ancestral to us, already out of the continent 1.8 million years ago, you know, all the way down to Southeast Asia. Now, if Homo erectus is indeed the direct predecessor, if you like, of Homo sapiens, we have a problem here because then we have, of course, we have a population within Africa that's called Homo agaster and then obviously the Homo erectus that are outside of Africa. Now, why is it the assumption is we have emerged from those in Africa?

10:33And what I argue in the book, you know, for a number of reasons, so it looks far more likely that the Homo sapiens lingers emerges from the second group that is already widely dispersed across the planet, right? So you have this divergence at this point in the story. And then my focus is largely on Eurasia and Oceania and I don't really go to the Americas because that's later on in the story, but basically that greater region beyond Africa. I tackle a couple of inter-Africa events, but the main difference here, yeah, of course, is we are not focusing on Africa, which is really in all the conventional models is where they say all the action happens there.

11:12I also position the major parts of the stories for Neanderthals, Denisovans, Red Deer Cave, you know, all of these other hominins, again, outside Africa. So we have this. Some of the other points I think people will find interesting is I go into the root of, you know, the origins of language, whether Homo erectus could speak, sailing, which I know we're going to tackle in a bit more detail, but whether or not we sail very early on, that's in there. And the true homelands of some of these hominins, which people would be quite surprised at where I would position Neanderthals and Denisovans and stuff rather than perhaps where they've been positioned in conventional models.

11:49So I think readers will find that it's very different. Also, particularly my folks in Australia, which is quite unique other than there's a couple of other writers out there that have suggested Australia plays a key role. But as far as I know, I'm the only person with a book that really offers a very concrete scientific argument for why we should be looking at Australia as really fundamental to the Homo sapiens and modern human story.

12:19Could you do a little bit of a deep dive for us there, though, Bruce? Like, let's talk about Australia specifically. What are some of the points within your research that has led you to continue to investigate that continent as one of the origins of, you know, modern humans today? Sure. I mean, initially it came up out of some other research I was doing. I was based in Ecuador for a while. And whilst there, I became involved with a site up in the Yangonatis, a jungle area in sort of central east Ecuador, part of the Amazon.

12:50And in there, there's a megalithic site, which shouldn't really be there. It's not Inca. It doesn't mesh with any of the known pre-Inca cultures of that region. And one thing that was particularly interesting, actually, is that on the blocks of this structure, there's a kind of mortar on the Inca. And as far as we know, all the other building cultures in that region didn't even use mortar. So this is somebody completely anomalous. But what I found was that there was some writing about some bones that were found in a cave not far from the site. And these were skeletons of Lagoa Santa type people.

13:22Now, for anyone who's not familiar with the Lagoa Santa, they are basically a Brazilian population, an ancient Brazilian population, whose skull morphology suggests that they are very similar in their looks to Australians and, you know, New Guinean people. So, right, except you've got them down, of course, in Brazil, in the Amazon, right? So this is peculiar. And then it also turns out these seem to be the first Americans. If you go down to some of the sites in Brazil, there's rock shelters that are coming up with dates suggestive of occupation 50,000 years ago, right?

13:54Now, that's obviously long, long before Clovis. You know, obviously, Clovis is in collapse anyway. But this tie-in between the site I was investigating and this early population, it really sort of sparks. Well, hang on a minute. But if there's these people there, you know, who seem to be Aboriginal Australians 50,000 years ago, how on earth does that tie into the out-of-Africa model? You know, this doesn't seem to mesh, right? And that's where I became a jumping-off point into, okay, now let me have a look and see what the heck is going on in Australia. Spring is here, and look at you.

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15:28So that was the beginnings of it. And what you find as well, the first thing you do when you go to Australia, of course, is the oral history. You know, they say, look, we've always been here. We're the first people. We're the first people in the world. You know, all others come from us. You know, we've been here since the dream time and so on and so on in all of their law stories, right? Of course, that's not white man's science or whatever. You know, so people will say, okay, these are just the local stories. But, you know, the interesting thing is as these law stories have been evaluated by scientists, more and more of them are being shown to be accurate.

16:00And there's a really fascinating one, you know, where there'll be a story of something falling from the sky. And, you know, they'll make up a, you know, a surrounding narrative. But when you get to the heart of it, if you follow the details in the story, you find a crater, right? And you find that crater, you know, was caused by a meteorite 15,000 years ago or something, right? Or the story about an area where they were living, you know, you go, you find it was under the water, you know, 20,000 years ago it went under the water. Stuff like this, where it's showing that there's an incredible unbroken lineage in these stories going really far back, right?

16:34And that they're not just tall tales, that they encompass genuine events, genuine knowledge. So it's interesting that, you know, from that perspective, that this is what the Aboriginal people are saying. And what I did, of course, was drill down into the archaeology, the anthropology, the genetics, you know, just to see what the heck's going on here. And it flags up a number of interesting things. I mean, particularly that, just to give one interesting point that people don't know, you'll often hear the expression that the sub-Saharan Africans are the most genetically diverse people in the world.

17:07And that that is one of the reasons why scientists are so sure that they are the basal sort of foundational population for Eurasians. But one of the things that was assumed here is, of course, is that Aboriginals are one of the last groups in the migration across Eurasia that they eventually, you know, they split off and go down to Australia. So they should be fairly, well, they shouldn't have huge genetic diversity, put it that way, because they're supposedly a splinter group from this broader migration. What you actually find is they have extraordinary genetic diversity.

17:38And at this stage, where the sampling is not very widespread, that they don't know how diverse, but I'm going to predict to you, it's going to become very obvious that they are more genetically diverse than sub-Saharan Africans. Because even in the small sample groups that have been run so far, they're finding this unbelievable diversity where, for example, people in the north versus some people in the south, if you take the Papuans and people to the south, they found that they were as genetically distinct as people from, you know, basically opposite sides of the world, right?

18:08And they're separated by what now is obviously some seed. But before, you know, if you go back to 13,000 years ago, there was no geological barrier. I mean, these were just sort of neighbouring people. The idea that they can be as diverse, you know, as people that be separated for unbelievable amounts of time and huge distance was really not expected. You know, they were thinking these are really closely, you know, interlinked people. And stuff like that, it's starting to flag up. But I think when they do a widespread genomic study, they're going to see that the Aboriginal people have the highest diversity in the world, which will mesh with what I'm telling you is that these people are the first people.

18:45And, you know, some of the other interesting, just kind of new data out there, thinking about how, you know, right now, if we look at sort of the standard model of anthropology, we see Jebel Air Hood, you know, originally thought to be part of Neanderthal, you know, genetic lineage, but is now assigned to Homo sapiens. That's roughly 300,000 years ago in northern Morocco. And then you actually posted something really interesting recently about the Hualongdong skull that was found not in Africa at all, right, but in Southeast Asia, which is also around 300,000 years old.

19:24And so to see that, you know, just that if you were almost to triangulate this stuff and say, you know, these are not geographically as related, but absolutely could potentially come from some origin point, you know, in the same region that these Aboriginal cultures are. Yeah. And this is one of the things that's been a problem is that there's a lot of finds in China, right? There's loads of really interesting fossil finds in China. But the focus, again, has been on Western academics, you know, American academics, Europeans, and their modelling, which usually is to do with Africa.

19:59So there's a sort of a bias. When we look at, say, Papers in Nature and stuff, you know, there is a bias towards the Western academics. And they also look down on the Chinese. This is something you find often. They'll say, oh, they're nationalistic. They're just trying to say that the Chinese are the first, et cetera, et cetera. Now, that's what happened, right? But the thing is, they still have these fossils. And yet you cannot, you know, no matter how people want to sort of spin this, the fact is they have, going back to about 700,000 years ago onwards, they have the greatest collection of transitional fossils that display both Homo sapiens and kind of erectus-like features, known, you know, more than Africa has.

20:35In fact, Africa has quite a gap around about 800,000 to 500,000 years ago, where there's not a lot of, not really, as far as I'm aware, transitional fossils, right? From 500,000 onwards, yes. But the Chinese seem to have an unbroken record. And also, they have a lot of these, you know, like the Dali skull and Lung Dong. There's several others. They've got, I just think, Jin Zhang. There's about four or five, which look to be archaic Homo sapiens, right? Which are going back, say, 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, right? And it's like, whoa, hang on a minute.

21:06You know, wasn't Homo sapiens supposed to be just in Africa, just emerging from 300,000 years ago? So how are we finding these archaic Homo sapiens skulls all the way down in China, right? So Chinese academics are saying, well, look, you know, what the hell are you, you know, saying that it's all in Africa when we've got these finds, right? Yes, maybe. Not just one, multiple. And then later on, they have modern human fossils, right, in a number of cave sites, which are dated 120,000 to 80,000, which, again, predates the recent out of Africa.

21:38So both the conventional models of, you know, out of Africa, the earlier migration, and also the recent out of Africa do not mesh at all well with the Chinese archaeology, right? And these are fundamental problems. So just shift gears a little bit, and you brought it up just a moment ago, but I know this is an area that both Andrew and I find really fascinating as evidence of just when humans used watercraft for the first time. And so the academically accepted timeline for Homo sapiens is a little bit different than some of the things that your research and some of your recent discoveries have uncovered.

22:14Can you break that down for us? Sure. I mean, if you go back just probably five years. Five to ten years ago, right, if you'd asked any academics, you know, when did any kinds of hominins, you know, first start to utilize watercraft in a, you know, in a really focused way, they would have said to you about 50,000 years ago when modern humans entered Australia, right? Now that has gone absolutely into the dustbin of history because we now know that there is clear evidence on the Mediterranean islands, right, of sailing of some sort, right?

22:51And again, when we say sailing, we're wary because watercraft, you know, we're thinking of hollowed out logs, perhaps basic rafts, you know, but something that you can utilize to cross a river or whatever. Obviously sailing implies a sail and a structured ship or something, you know, but certainly watercraft were being employed, right? So if you had to get to this Mediterranean island, you know, you had to cross water. It wasn't a case of where once upon a time, you know, it was dry and they could walk across, right? So they, and this dated back about, I think it was a couple hundred thousand years, right? But it was a hundred and something to 200,000 years.

23:22And so straight away, you've got an issue there. These aren't modern humans, you know, right? So who are they exactly? We don't know. But there's, there's so many stone tools on this island that it wasn't reasonable to say, you know, this is one guy washed across or, you know, this has to be a whole community, you know, manufacturing a large number of stone tools. And then, of course, you've also got now Flores, where we have the Hobbit people and on other nearby islands, they found stone tools, you know, there's fossils and a range of dates. But basically from about a million years ago, you've got water crossings in Southeast Asia to have got to Java and Flores and onwards.

24:00So you've got some kind of movement across water from then on. 700,000 years ago is the early signs of Homo florensis, these early Hobbit people. So we know that these people are moving, you know, there's people moving around. And the other one is down on Socotra, which is not well known. This is an obscure study, a Russian study that was done on, on this island, which is off the tip of South Africa. And again, you have to cross a significant distance of water, very powerful currents, you know, going around the tip of Africa. Someone has to have strategically meant to get to this island.

24:31You know, this is not, again, not washed out. It's quite a lengthy distance. Somebody has reached Socotra and there's stone tools there, which are being dated to, well, they think they could be as old as a million years old again. So this stuff is really, is really rewriting, you know, we had to follow these land pathways to get to places. And when you start thinking about it, you look at a map and you start thinking, well, if a million years ago we had boats, there's a lot of places where you think, well, hang on a minute, were we crossing here? You know, were we crossing there? And you can rethink migrations in your mind, just think, well, if they just crossed that little bit of water there instead of walking, you know, all the way around the continent.

25:07And, you know, then suddenly you have very different models for how people were moving around, right? But let me ask you this then. I mean, we have two different camps out there. You know, you've got isolationism versus diffusionism. Have you seen a shift in trajectory between how those two camps interact with one another since these discoveries and these studies were completed? Or is it still pretty divided, right? I mean, like one group thinking that, nope, there's no way that anybody was, you know, employing watercraft and, you know, trans-oceanic contact, all the different things? Or, like, how has this theory rocked that community, if at all?

25:41You know, I think people tend to, you know, it's hard to get people to change from a paradigm. You know, if you are within a paradigm, you tend to see through the eyes of that paradigm. So, yeah, it's rare for people to completely jump ship, but you're seeing some modifications to paradigms. I mean, like, for example, if you look at the multiregionalists, right? You know, they've been shown to be right in some respects, okay? So we know now that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, right? That was one of the predictions of the multiregionalist model, okay?

26:12Whereas, you know, the purely sort of Africa, out of Africa people who said, no, you know, there wasn't any multiregionalists. They've had to modify that, and they say now, well, actually, it was multiregionalism, but limited to, within all regions of Africa, parts of the Near East in Western Asia. So they've had to change, you know, they're now, so in a way, you could say everyone's a multiregionalist now. That's one major change. And the acceptance of interbreeding between hominids, which is being forced on people, which, you know, a lot of folks predicted it wasn't possible, that Neanderthals was too different as a species to have mixed with us.

26:49But now, again, that's gone out the window. In fact, we're finding that, you know, that modern humans are really a hybrid, many different groups. I think we're going to find, in the end, that we are a hybrid of a much larger number, right, than we know now. We don't have names for some of these hominids whose DNA were detecting in us, right? So at the moment, there's a kind of an artificial idea that we are kind of a mixture of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and, you know, I guess a direct homo sapiens ansatz. But that's not really true.

27:20I mean, they've already found ghost population DNA, right, in some different living groups today, around two or three of these lineages. They now know there was at least three different groups that are being called Denisovans, but they're all going to need to have their own names, really, because they've got really deep, divergent states who come to that as well. But essentially, so you've got three populations that are being called Denisovans. Probably more than, you know, there's at least a couple of different kind of Neanderthals. Again, so do we call them different names, perhaps? So you've got Hyderbergensis, turns out to be an early Neanderthal, so that's been a rewrite.

27:50And then, yeah, we've got people like Red Deer Cave, these florists, you know, the Hobbit people in florists, a whole load of very small people that are getting found around the Indonesian and Philippines Islands. You know, we've now got two other islands with what seems to be diminutive humans on them, right? So this map of, you know, of early people, it's expanding a lot, and it's becoming clear that we ourselves have a lot of DNA coming from more populations than we ever imagined, put it that way. So I think everyone's community is having to be modified by this, even if they don't fully jump paradigms.

28:24Right, right. We've got to jump to just a quick commercial break, but when we come back, more from Bruce Fenn.

28:35Spring is here, and look at you. You're still stressed. Allow me to introduce the all-new Acora Plunge Collection, designed to combine performance, durability, and elegance, and available in 15 or 19 feet. It's perfect for training, cooling off, or dramatically floating while rethinking your life choices. And remember, every spa comes loaded, covered, cover lifts, steps, chemical kit, and delivered right to your spot.

29:08You just sit, you just soak, and you forget everyone's name. Dynasty Spas, exit 49 in Athens. Online, dynastyspastore.com. All right, welcome back to this week's episode of Lost Origins. If you're just tuning in, we are reconnecting with our old friend, Bruce Fenton.

29:39And before the break, we were starting to get pretty hot and heavy with the Out of Africa Theory. And Bruce, we recently had Andrew Collins on the show, Tale End of Last Season, and I mean, his latest book really focuses on Neanderthals and Denisovans and all the things. And we had an amazing conversation with him. I'd really like to get your take as to what your research is focusing on, more specifically with the story of the hybridization of the Denisovans, the Neanderthals, and then basically where their homelands were. Walk us through some of your research around that, if you could, Bruce. Yeah, Denisovans is obviously a bit of a hot-button subject.

30:13I think that everyone's kind of interested in it, if they're not usually following these topics. I've not read, you know, Colin's book with little. I'm aware of the content, you know, what they kind of cover. But I can certainly give you my view, which I know is quite different to theirs. Do it. In a way, because, to be honest, nobody else, except for academics, really deep dives this topic in a way I do. And I'm not saying that in a sort of, you know, an arrogant way. It's just I've put a lot of focus, particularly into this harmony and evolutionary story, whereas other people tend to be putting it into a different context, like looking at, you know, Gobekli Tepe or the Mounds.

30:52You know, they obviously have another focus, right? Mine is purely what the heck's going on with all these humans. Now, if you look back, essentially you have the emergence of a lineage that will lead to us, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and several others, which occurs around about 800,000 years ago. And obviously we covered this a bit in the other interview we did, so I don't rehash this too much. But essentially we know there's a number of genetic changes that occur in the genome, which basically causes a splinter, you know, a lineage to diverge away from the last common ancestor.

31:28And then soon after that, the lineage that leads to Neanderthals and Denisovans breaks away from ours, and then they have a split. And so this is all around between 500 to 780,000 years ago that this is happening, right, these particular splits. Now, I position all of these down in Southeast Asia and Oceania, not Africa. You have the Homo erectus and you have at least one other population, possibly Habilis or another early hominin. We're now suspecting that there's someone else already down in Southeast Asia who are the ancestors of Florenciensis.

32:03The feeling is that this is not Homo erectus giving rise to these Hobbit people, but another group, possibly a kind of Australopithecus. There's somebody else already out there. In fact, this somebody else may be the ancestors of Homo erectus, right, because we're not sure yet. But so one of these two, which whoever it is, maybe a mixture of the two, they give rise to these first, well, not the lineage that will lead to us, Neanderthals and Denisovans. So I'm positioning this event down mostly in Northern Australia, the Indonesian islands and Southeast Asia or Sahel, Sunda, right?

32:39And the interesting thing about that is my book was the first to predict this, that the Denisovans essentially had their homeland in Australia. Now, a couple of years back, people would have thought that's ludicrous, right? That's a ludicrous idea because the Denisovans were only found up in Siberia, the Denisovans cave. So it's like, well, how can you be putting them down in Australia? You know, now what they're finding is, of course, that the Papuans carry this signature of around 6% or so of the dead DNA is Denisovan DNA.

33:10And it's not just one Denisovan group, but potentially three different groups, right? The people in Siberia, they carry no Denisovan DNA today. So we know that this is not really a heartland of Denisovans, okay? So they didn't even interbreed with the humans who moved into the area. So there couldn't have been many of them there or they'd, you know, pretty much on the extinction. By the time modern humans arrive, okay? Because there's no signature for them. If you go to East Asia, you'll find a signature for Denisovans amongst East Asian people, but very low. It's usually around 0.1% to 1% of the DNA, or the genome, okay?

33:43It's only down in Ireland, Southeast Asia, and basically what it's called now, obviously, Oceania, Australasia, that we find this strong signature. The accepted model, basically, is moving towards is that, well, how can this be? It suggests that the Denisovans are already in Australasia when the encounter happens with modern humans, right? So they're living isolated down there. And then you get to another problem. You find that in the latest studies, these other Denisovans branches, that some of them have split from each other around 400,000 years ago, right?

34:20So enormously deep, enormously deep diversion. Now, where else does that happen? We don't find evidence of this anywhere else. It's looking like there's multiple Denisovans populations down in Australia. So this is their homeland, right? That you've got multiple populations who themselves have deep, deep divergences, enough that we'd be talking about being on their way towards separate subspecies, right? So nobody, when I put my book out back in early 2017, nobody would have been, else was really thinking down that route. But, you know, I could see from the studies I was doing, it was clearly going that way.

34:54And there's other things that people haven't clocked onto yet. I mean, you may not know this, but Papua New Guinea has the most intense clustering of distinct languages on the planet. You know, and it's one small, one relatively small island, okay? And you have something like, I think it's about 800 languages with different language groups. Although there's not one language group that, you know, loads, dozens of separate language groups. I believe that we have in there Denisovan languages, right, as well, which have persisted and they're modified.

35:25But obviously now they're modified, you wouldn't be the same as they were, you know, when the Denisovans were a separate group. But when you see this wealth of languages, I think that we had a contraction of populations into northern Sahel and including several lineages of Denisovans and other groups. And that's why we have not only this fantastical mix of DNA, but a fantastical mix of languages that's nowhere else like that. So there was a number of clues, you could say.

35:51But even at the Denisovans, I'm not kidding, I'll give you a chance to jump in. I was going to say, but even at the Denisova cave, there's clues there. Because when they were testing the DNA, what they found was that one of the Denisovans there, she actually had DNA from modern humans of the Papuan population type, right? So it's like, hang on a minute, it's looking more like this is someone who's come up, you know, or a population that's made their way up from northern Australia to Siberia. So again, I think that we have is the vestiges of a migration, an early migration out of Australia involving Denisovans who have encountered modern humans.

36:29There's been a mix. And they're the people that, you know, are coming up into Siberia. And that's why I say it's not the homeland. That's why we don't find this, their signature within Siberian people today. This is an outlying cave on the edges, if you like, of their world, right? It's not, this is not their homeland. So Bruce, just because, you know, we don't always get the opportunity. Spring is here. And look at you. You're still stressed. Allow me to introduce the all-new Akora Plunge Collection, designed to combine performance, durability, and elegance, and available in 15 or 19 feet.

37:03It's perfect for training, cooling off, or dramatically floating while rethinking your life choices. And remember, every spa comes loaded, covered, cover lifts, steps, chemical kit, and delivered right to your spot. You just sit, you just soak, and you forget everyone's name. Dynasty Spas, exit 49 in Athens. Online, dynastyspastore.com. You speak with somebody with the depth of anthropological knowledge that you have, and more so just as a question, less so as any kind of challenge. Can you break down a kind of your understanding of, you know,

37:34when we think about some of the traditional models that you have this Homo heidelbergensis, the theory of the kind of branching into the Neanderthal and Denisovan. So, where does, do you see them as a separate genetic lineage, or do you see them coming from that lineage? What has your research indicated to you? In my view, and I accept, you know, there's a guy, Milton Wolpoff, who's really one of the fathers of multiregionalism. You know, he says that, in his view, you don't get true speciation in hominins

38:09until about a million years of isolation from each other, right, in two groups. Now, there's not been a million years since the divergence of these large-brained hominins, right? So, yes, if you think that the very early part of the split that leads to all these large-brained hominins, if that's occurring around 800,000 years ago, so even if they were just separate all that time, it's not quite enough. I mean, obviously, it's getting close. The thing is, we know that they weren't. We know that there's been interbreeding multiple times, right?

38:40And there doesn't seem to be at any point, at least for the persisted, at any point where a population would not end up mixing with another population, right? We're starting to find that there was, you know, mixing going back 500,000 years ago, 300,000 years ago here, you know, 200,000 years. And that whenever groups kind of bump up against each other again, they start interbreeding, you know? They don't think, oh, you know, what are these creatures? They recognize each other. Yeah, they recognize each other as humans. And it's funny, you'll see an attitude in some of the articles where they say,

39:11you know, how could they? How could, you know, how could modern humans sleep with these Denisovan creatures? Or so, but, you know, they saw each other and they saw human beings, right? They didn't know the DNA lineage or they didn't think that their forehead was a bit too big so they can't be humans. You know, these are modern ideas. Clearly, you know, they were, in many respects, no different than, say, let's say a pygmy person from Africa meeting maybe, you know, a South American tribes person or the differences we'd see, you know, between different groups today. Well, obviously, we have a lot of differences within the human population.

39:44You can have two people that look very unlike each other, you know, Sam Bushman at seven foot and a pygmy at like, you know, five foot, whatever. You know, we have these differences. We still recognize each other as humans, right? And people intermarry across all these groups. So, it's a sort of strange idea that they would have seen each other and said, ooh, you know, what are they? I mean, they obviously knew these were. Well, I mean, if you look back at like my college career, I definitely made some suspect dating decisions. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's up? She's like, I'm seven feet tall. You're like, yeah, girl, that's why I'm here. That's right. Right? People do. I mean, if there's anything that humans will pretty much make any answer for,

40:18it's having sex with other humans. I mean, you know, that we know that. I mean, we know that. Language has been no barrier. You know, size has been no barrier, class, all the rest. So, it's been happening the whole time. There's never been a point. So, to my view, what we really have is what I tend to think of as a greater Homo sapiens family. And I say that because when I say Homo sapiens, I'm thinking of the implication of being, you know, intelligent, sapiens, intelligence, basically big brained, right?

40:49So, from around 800,000 years ago, we have the genetic changes that will inevitably take us to large brains, whether we're Neanderthals, Denisovans, modern humans. All of these groups end up with the large brain. To me, all of these are one species. I would accept that Neanderthals and us, et cetera, are different subspecies within that group, okay? But I don't think we are fully separate species. And clearly, once upon a time, species inferred you couldn't interbreed for a start, right? Now, people are sort of modifying that meaning, but we know there was extensive interbreeding.

41:23So, from a conventional understanding of what species is, we were one species, you know, perfectly able to interbreed. I'm not saying there was never any problems that you might not lose some fetus here and there, you know, that it might not have been always easy, but clearly it happened quite extensively, because, you know, most of us in this conversation will have probably 3% Neanderthal and maybe traces of other, you know, other hominins in us. So, clearly it was extensive. So, let's go even way further back here. I know there's a recent discovery in Crete, of all places,

41:56of a humanoid footprint that potentially dates back to something like 6 million years ago. Can you talk about this discovery and any implications this holds for the kind of chronology that we've been discussing? Sure. I mean, this is a controversial find. The authors of the study have, you know, they've had a lot of flack, just simply because it's controversial, not because there was anything wrong with their study, you know, not because it was inaccurate or badly done, but people didn't want to accept it, because what they found is that the footprints on Crete,

42:27yeah, around 5-6 million years, are around about as modern in their structure as the African ones, it's La La Tollae, where you've got these, the earliest human-like bridge to the foot and displacement of toes in a footprint in Africa. But they said these ones down in Crete, you know, looking almost perhaps a little bit more modern, right? And this is, you know, this has been a bit of a head-scratcher for the conventional modern. Because, well, you know, supposedly, you know, he couldn't have headed out of Africa that early.

42:58But when you really look back at that period, I mean, Southern Europe was at one point the major, you know, hothouse for the pre-Hominid ancestors, right? When they moved away from Southeast Asia, and I said it was just climate shift, they moved into sort of Southern Europe, okay? And then there's some later events, around 5 million years ago or so, that by that point they're supposed to have sort of faded out from that region, and you've just got the African group. But we don't really know that. We don't know that there was none left there.

43:29We also don't know for sure that the evolution is happening, you know, that leads to hominins. It's really just an African story. And this find is kind of saying, well, hang on a minute, you know, we've got footprints here at 5 million years that look awfully like they're on their way to being, you know, human, you know, if you like, they definitely look like hominin footprints. And they're older than, you know, similar looking ones in Africa. So that's a problem. There's also been a couple of fossil finds down in Greece, I think it was in Bulgaria,

44:00that some people were spinning as being possibly, again, you know, as evidence of early hominins at 7 million years. Now, there's a strange kind of contest, you know, that goes on. Everything has to be in Africa. And if it's not, there's kind of this strange idea that, you know, you're maybe a racist or you're just somehow just really controversial. But I don't really know what this idea of adherence to out of Africa comes from. Because if you really think about it, it's like, well, at what point do we decide an ancestor is important? Because as I've already inferred there, we've already been down in Southeast Asia,

44:31you know, early primates, right? They have moved, okay? They've moved to Southern Europe, right? Then they've technically moved to Africa, right? And then we have all these other groups that move out. But at what stage do we say, well, this is the ones that matter, you know? And it's out from wherever they're standing, you know? So it's a kind of a strange idea because, you know, it comes down to really, my feeling about anthropology, if you go back, you know, particularly to the Victoria... Spring is here. And look at you. You're still stressed.

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45:31were going out and pretty much founding the field, they went out looking for Eden. Yeah? They went out looking for Eden and Adam and Eve, and what they decided upon in the end was, you know, that quest eventually led to East Africa and, you know, an ancestral Adam and Eve. And obviously, even in science, we talk about, you know, genetic Eve and all this. And so, that's always been kind of mixed in there. And the idea of exodus, you know, out of the garden, right? So that there's been these waves out of Eden, you know, from Ancestral. I mean,

46:01and a lot of that's just baloney. And when you think about it, you think, well, yeah, really, it's not, this isn't scientific. And the idea of waves from Africa, when you sort of think about that, you think, well, why can no one ever walk back into Africa? You know, why is it always waves out of Africa? So, you know, the gates open, run out, we're closing it behind you. You know, no one comes back into Africa. You know, you've been banished from the garden. You know, it's a funny idea, isn't it? Because when you look at it scientifically, there's absolutely no barriers to people coming into Africa.

46:32And so, in reality, that's what's happening. Okay. You have a chaotic movement of people. Once hominins exist, and once they're fairly widespread, no matter where you start them. So, if we know that by 2 million years ago, or say 1.8 million years ago, we've got hominins widespread. So, at that point, you know, it's chaos. Yeah. It's not waves coming out of anywhere. It's different groups following game, or following plants,

47:02or joining with another group, you know, interbreeding. If they don't like the climate in Asia, they can walk back to Africa. Nothing's stopping them, you know, and vice versa. If Africa's not doing well, people will go out. Okay. Now, for some reason, this model has always been ignored or rejected for some reason. It's always these waves from Africa. Now, you may have noticed that they found a part of a skull in Greece recently. Okay. And that came up as being about 300,000 years old or something. Okay.

47:32Now, they said it's a Homo sapiens skull. I think 200 and something to 300,000. Very old. Right. I mean, you have to double check that. But basically, it's so old. Yeah. The oldest evidence of Homo sapiens in the Mediterranean, that it's straight away, they turned and said, well, this is evidence of another migration from Africa. It's like, yeah, people will stray with or swallow that because they're so used to being told that line that every time you find one that's older, it's another migration out of Eden. You know, it's like the default setting basically.

48:02Yeah. It's like, wait a minute. Couldn't that just be evidence that we have a widespread, longstanding population outside of the continent, right? And that this is just one skull from that lineage that could have been there from, you know, 500,000 years ago. And that this is just from that lineage. Why does it always infer another migration? Right? There's nothing scientific at all about that idea. There's, there's no basis. He didn't come with a sticker saying, no, he'd made an Africa on him. Right? And you don't know what, do you know which direction he was walking when he died? I don't think he left any notes. So, so this is a, it's a really,

48:34it's a strange idea that we don't question because we're used to just getting told these things and swallowing it without then critically thinking and thinking, how on earth would they know that this is the result of another migration? Right? So this is a fundamental rewriting. What I would want people to really imagine is that from the moment Homo sapiens exist, you know, even before that, the moment Homo erectus is widespread. From then on, right, Africa, Eurasia, right, and probably America,

49:04because there's some evidence to suggest very early habitation there, and Australia, right, all have hominins living fairly continuously, moving around, mixing, right, fairly continuously from then on, except for when there are climatic problems or other cataclysms, which remove humans from one area or displace them, you know, or there's a virus or something. Those are the only reasons why we get, you know, abandoned landmasses or migrations after that.

49:37Really, you've got to start thinking of the world as being continuously populated from the time Homo erectus reaches Southeast Asia, 1.8 million years ago, at least, if not before, right? That's crazy. When you think of that, it makes sense, yeah, because instead of these waves and these, oh, where do they all go? Why is there not yet another wave? Where are they going? You know, this strange idea that they're walking out into the nothing. It's like, well, no, no, there's people there. There's always people there. You know, there's all kinds, and then mostly similar kinds of people. Homo erectus times, there wasn't a lot of other hominins, right, that we know of. Homo erectus seems to be the master of his domain,

50:08but once we have these splits, you know, there's all sorts of people everywhere, but the bottom line is they are everywhere, and that's when I say you look at these Chinese finds and stuff that they make sense in the context of what you'd kind of expect if you're looking at this objectively, that there would be people from then on everywhere, yeah, and so what really happens, and this is where you start rewriting it, and they say, well, okay, when we look at the genetic evidence, you know, they say, we think that, you know, all modern humans,

50:39at least, you know, that they came from Africa, and that we can look at the genetics. Of course, when you look at going further back, there's a problem, because we don't have, except for the old genetic information from Homo sapiens, right, right. The oldest DNA that we have today comes from the Sema de los Huesos site in Spain. Now, those were essentially Homo hyderbergensis, which are ancestral Neanderthals, and I know that we touched on that earlier, that once upon a time, Homo hyderbergensis was considered to be the ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans,

51:13but what they found with the DNA of Sema de los Huesos, and due to the age of the site, which is about 500,000 years old, in fact, these were too early on, and they were too Neanderthal-like to make sense of them being, you know, Hyderbergensis being ancestral to both. So, we now know that Hyderbergensis is basically a Neanderthal, right? That's the oldest DNA we have, so that's not an ancestor of ours. The oldest Homo sapiens DNA, I think at the moment, is, I feel like 50,000 years old, or so. We don't have, we don't have really,

51:45truly, truly ancient, ancient DNA, right, for our lineage, due to where they've extracted it, you know, we have to find someone who's in a particular world-preserved condition, you know, say in an ice cave, obviously, or just in a climate where the DNA is not completely gone. Potentially, you can recover DNA up to a million years old. That's, that's what they think the technical limits, maybe one to 1.5 million years. So, you know, we can go quite far back. They've done a horse DNA that's 700,000 years old,

52:15so we know it technically can happen, right? But yeah, so that's where we're at. We, we have this, this argument that, okay, what actually, what's happened to populate the world? You know, who are we kind of, if we, we move to the Homo sapiens story, and again, I'm for several reasons. I mean, can you go into why I position it in Australia, or it's up to you, but I position it in Australia. Sure. You mentioned fundamental rewrites there, Bruce, and I think that that's a great jumping off point to talk about another discovery that warrants poking that bear,

52:47right? So that discovery is essentially unearthing of some stone tools that I believe dated back to like 2.5 million years ago in Algeria, right? And then there's also a discovery in China dating back to what, like 2.1 million years ago against stone tools. And so spring is here and look at you, you're still stressed. Allow me to introduce the all new Acora plunge collection designed to combine performance, durability, and elegance and available in 15 or 19 feet. It's perfect for training, cooling off, or dramatically floating while rethinking your life choices.

53:20And remember, every spa comes loaded, covered, cover, lift, steps, chemical kit, and delivered right to your spot. You just sit, you just soak, and you forget everyone's name. Dynasty Spas, exit 49 in Athens. Online, DynastySpaStore.com. There's several articles floating around out there that talk about how this potentially warrants a rewriting of the out-of-Africa theory. And so like, just break us off on what we're looking at here. Explain these discoveries, walk us through those events, and then explain to us why they warrant the re-examination of the timeline,

53:51essentially. Sure. Yeah. So this, yeah, this free set, I think it's also Lebanon. And yeah, these, these tools really, they infer that there is a hominin population widespread for Homo erectus. And so rather than an exodus from Africa around 2 million years ago, it looks more like there's already an extensive, you know, widespread population of an unknown hominin, probably ancestral to Homo erectus, who is already as far, you know, far widespread as you say, you know, all the way from Africa to China. Right. So this then allows for evolution in situ down in Asia and elsewhere to Homo erectus.

54:29Right. So then you start to, well, then you've got to say the Georgian Homo erectus, which was a, which was a surprise find a few years back, 1.8 million year old, roughly 1.8 million year old Homo erectus finds up in Georgia in the mountains. And then you put that into that context. You start thinking, well, did they migrate out of Africa or these and in situ evolution? And the interesting thing is some of these skulls from the side, there's five skulls, they actually looked awfully a lot like earlier Habilis or another group. So even in that small group of five skulls,

55:02they said there was enough variation to infer that groups that we had once thought were separate species may all be part of the greater variety within the Homo erectus population. So what we may really have is a transition going on fairly globally from an earlier Hominin towards Homo erectus. And we're seeing the diversity across the order of these changes. So we're seeing some that still look more, more ancestral to the others, but they're living at this contemporary time. And to see that kind of level of diversity within five skulls in one burial site,

55:35you know, this is astonishing that it can literally rewrite our understanding of different species. So this other find plays into that. It suggests that we need to think maybe that hominins are widespread, perhaps 2.5 million years ago, before erectus has even emerged. And again, this fits with the new understanding of the Homo florenciensis hobbit people, because when you, when they study the morphology and they try and take them back to who their likely ancestor was, although they've speculated it'd be Homo erectus, because they knew these, these ones were down in the region,

56:06right? But they didn't seem to stack up. And it was suggestive that there was an earlier Hominin in the region who made its way to Flores. And now this meshes with these stone tools very well, because it's pointing to an even earlier, you know, global population who has then given rise to all of these, you know, later forms. And there's no need for, after that, really, there's no need for this Africa as the cradle of civilization. What you instead have is you need to think globally. You think basically evolution in hominins is happening across regions,

56:40interbreeding between groups, that there's a flow of genes from Africa all the way down to Southeast Asia, that groups mix, you know, on the edges of their territory. And so there's a progression, you know, for gene sharing, moving around and, and other evolutionary pressures where everyone is kind of changing together, right? That there's not, it's not waves coming out and new replacements. You know, there's that idea, I think is really going to go down the toilet. I think, I think it's becoming more, more obvious. It really is. I mean, I think that it's clear now that probably 2.5 million years won't,

57:12won't stay, you know, it'll probably go back earlier, but you know, it keeps going back, you know, that really it's a, a multi-regional story that, that we are out there, you know, hominins are out there, you know, and even in, in the Americas, there's been a few skulls, which seems to be homo erectus skulls,