good afternoon everyone a very warm welcome to the Natural History Museum um I'm Deborah swallow the president of the royal anthropological Institute for three years and um delighted to be so and so very warmly welcome you to this event which has followed the really wonderful successful mostly Out of Africa conference that's been held yesterday and then this morning here very much in honor of Chris Stringer but showing the long-term impact of of of his leadership but with some fascinating and wonderful papers but this event now is the Royal anthropological Institute Huxley lecture 2023 which we are delighted is being given by Professor Chris Stringer um I would just like i' like to say a few words uh before we start it is an absolutely great pleasure to introduce this this afternoon's Huxley medalist and lecturer Professor Chris Stringer Chris joined the Natural History Museum in 1973 became a fellow of the Royal Society in 19 in 2004 and received his CBE in 2023 he's received numerous medals including the raai rivers award ward in 2004 he directed The Project ancient human occupation of Britain from 2001 to 2012 funded by the levium trust and has led a major program of human evolution research at the Natural History Museum funded by the ca Foundation since 2011 as you all know there have been many hux lecturers all of them highly distinguished but probably few who are so much the direct scientific heir of Thomas H Huxley Huxley was most famous for his book man's place in nature published in 1865 that book of course was important for being among the very first to show that humans fit naturally into the evolutionary diversity of life and that there is a fossil history to humanity our lecturer Chris Stringer is one of the most significant scientists to have built on huxley's foundations homonyms have a direct distinct fossil record going back about 7 million years but it is the last million that have perhaps been the most significant for that is the time when modern humans or Homo sapiens evolved we now have a good understanding of where and when that happened in Africa and in geological terms relatively recently the last few hundred thousand years this is the so-called Out of Africa model and Chris strer was one of the Architects and Originators of this model back in the 1980s at the time it was cont controversial radical and strongly opposed gradually the evidence in favor grew stronger and stronger and Chris proved a courageous and persistent voice against the critics he steadfastly continued to accumulate the evidence especially showing the chronology of the human and nandal fossil record he was not however a dogmatic defender of the faith and it is one of those signals of his strength as a pale paleoanthropologist that he was almost always the first to see how the model need adapting in the light of new evidence mostly Out of Africa as the title of this of his lecture indicates mostly Out of Africa a paleontologist by training he became Adept at the genetics and the archology that were increasingly Central to the field and as the subject developed his perspective became increasingly Global and multi-disciplinary he manages I think brilliantly to be both the distinct loan scientist and an influential collaborator in many teams across the world it's hard even to contemplate recent human evolution without recognizing the enormous debt to Chris's foundational contributions as if that was not enough Chris has been a tieless voice for the importance of evolution and how we need to know about our past to understand the species we are his long association with the Natural History Museum through his work now an international center for human evolutionary studies gave him a platform to speak for many of his colleagues his books and talks are prolific and influential none more so than his homo britannicus Chris has been a leading the leading figure in pulling together the resources and expertise to really establish how our Island not always an island of course was populated and depopulated over hundreds of thousands of years and against the backdrop of the comings and goings of the great ice sheets that once covered Britain so it is very with very great pleasure that we turn now to our speakers to invite him to accept the Huxley medal and to deliver tonight well this afternoon's check it again lecture mostly Out of Africa how when and where Chris open I'll open it later well I can't I don't know if it's might need some help with opening it I'm not sure I don't want to if you know just to show everybody just hold it yes there it [Laughter] is check yes I've got okay so first of all can you hear me at the back good great thank you um yes uh what a couple of days it's been um and I hope there's a also a virture audience watching as well this talk so thank you very much for those generous words and thank you of course to the REI for this award um and it is really humbling to see the names of the people who've received this before so thank you very much um and thanks of course for this meeting um the concept of this meeting and thank you to all of the people here whove made this meeting such a success they've organized all the work behind the scenes um and the audience too because we've had some great discussions and questions so uh I'd better get on with this talk um mostly Out of Africa how when and where and I'll come back to this figure a bit later on so I had prepared a a proper long thank you uh but to be honest it's um you know it will go on for too long um it would be quite emotional so I was going to thank everyone from my uh late parents and foster parents through to my colleagues in the museum now but I think what I will say is I thank the ri already but I think uh to progress in this area you've got to be fortunate in your mentors your colleagues your collaborators your friends your family and of course your funding bodies and I have been lucky so thank a lot of you here for that and people online too so thank you so I'm going to look at first of all some ancient history in in my early years in the field look at the developing complexity in the story of our origins in Africa and dispers us from there look at new data from Europe and Asia about the neander sales and the earliest homos sapians outside of Africa look at the denans who occupied sites in East Asia and almost certainly southeast Asia over many Millennia and then some concluding remarks and a look at some ongoing issues all of that in in just under an hour we'll see so first of all really ancient history this um on the left is a typical evolutionary tree from the late 1960s and very few species there and for humans only two species Homo erectus and Homo sapiens we've got homohabilis below there but in the late 60s there was even debate about whether homohabilis was really separate was it uh really just a kind of ostr osine so even habis wasn't generally accepted by everyone in the late 1960s so two main species only uh in later human evolution Homo erectus and Homo sapiens and between erectus and sapiens often inserted was a neand stage of evolution sometimes specifically neand sometimes things called neand loids and this exhibition case from the central Hall in the museum in the late 1960s shows you that that I've put an ellipse there around neander toids and on that display case there you've got fossils from nangong which today we will call Homo erectus we've got the fossil from cadway that we might call hyanis or renis we've got the remains from Mount Carmel both nandes and what we would Now call Early Homo sapiens all of those are called neander toids so really the classifications we were working with when I began my PhD were were very limited in terms of displaying diversity everything was pigeon hold into these categories and there was a dominant view in in many circles that cultural change was driving human evolution Lauren brace was particularly influential in that so brace argued that the changes from the middle panthic to the upper Paleolithic were what was driving the evolution of homo sapiens from a neander like human so as it says on the left there we've got cultural advances they lead to dental reduction changes in the musculature around the Jaws there's a decrease in facial size and the whole Cranium is remodeled to a modern human shape so that was brace's view which was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s when I was doing my PhD and those views were still around in the 1980s so Rand white there's a quotee here from Randy 1982 if there's a relationship between culture and biology across the middle upper paralithic boundary cultural developments are stimulating biological change rather than vice versa so these were the influential views that were around and in terms of where Homo sapiens originated well of course for many of those workers Homo sapiens was very broad it included the neand it included ndong it included what we now call homo hyenes or renis so sapiens was all around the world but if we limit it to what Bill hows called anatomically modern Homo sapiens where did that form originate well there were different views around so we have the neand model that argued that we evolve from the neand in Europe hitka was an influential promoter of that theory and he had his disciples that followed that we had Clark how's model of a generalized nandal origin so Clark how envisioned that there was a a generalized neand form um closer to Homo sapiens and it diverged it developed a specialized form that became the classic neanders holes in Europe but the forms in Western Asia the ones that we see at tulan schol evolve through into Homo sapiens which then spread out we had Global models so so brace's view was that there was a Neal stage everywhere every continent Africa Europe Asia southeast Asia had its equivalent of atile and humans evolved through that stage with cultural changes to become Homo sapiens in those different regions the multi-regional model so France ven Colton [ __ ] and then their successors argued that there was really just one species Homo sapiens over the last one and a half million years and within that homo sapiens all around the world there was Evolution towards the modern form of human and there was a minority of people and Bill how was the most prominent one probably who argued that there was something in anatomically modern humans that was distinct and that probably had a single origin somewhere in the world but certainly in the 1960s and70s no one could point to where that origin might be so this was a minority View so yes uh some of you will have seen this picture before um this is me in 1971 on my PhD trip um so I began my PhD in 1970 uh applying multivariate methods to plasticine crania measuring them with calipers and tapes and so on and then putting them into a very primitive computer bigger than the size of this room but with about as much power as my wristwatch uh Bristol's Mainframe computer um this work was supervised by Jonathan mgra sadly died in the last few months Jonathan um and so I went around Europe a year later and tried to measure all the available fossil material in European museums and institutes that could help me really look at whether the nean was made good ancestors for Homo sapiens um so I drove around in this old Morris thousand car had lots of Adventures got robbed a few times uh uh lock locked out of the Czechoslovakia because of my uh long hair until the Border guard said well actually you look a bit like Chay gavara we'll let you in so um and so this is a summary of my results from my PhD 1974 uh again trying to work with with the classifications we had and I've superimposed some something a bit more recent over them to make more sense but we've got on the right hand side there what we can call modern humans the upper Paleolithic people are in there on my analyses in terms of cranial shape SCH five from Mount carel fell into that group there were two fossils from Africa IO eleru and omo one that seem to fall in the modern group although they did have some archaic affinities as well and then on the Other Extreme on the top left we've got the nandal group The Classic Neals of Europe the Western Asian neand such as Amud things that might be early Neals such as sacka pastori maybe steinheim maybe SW Onin below that and at the bottom left there we've got the archaic humans homoerectus represented by the fines from China from Beijing and from solo nangong and Java and the two other fossils broken Hill and petralona which sort of fell away from the other groups but they were similar in some ways to each other so this was the sort of network I built up and it was difficult to make out a case for an origin of homo sapiens anywhere but what I could say was that and the andal was made very unlikely ancestors for modern Homo sapiens because they seem to be going off in their own evolutionary Direction particularly in the shape of the face away from what was to become the homo sapience pattern and fossil sash as je Hood At noro 2 they seem to have mixed affinities jood seemed to lie somehow between the neales and Homo sapiens omo 2 seemed in some ways more primitive um than that so a lot of diversity in Africa and I couldn't make much sense of it at the time and we'll see why in a moment so here's a diagram from a a popular book that I contributed to in 1976 and you won't be able to read all that stuff there but basically in this diagram covering the last 300,000 years again working with the views of the time there were only two species on this diagram Homo sapiens modern Homo sapiens at the top homoerectus right at the bottom and a thing called early Homo sapiens that encompassed a huge diversity so here's a closeup on that the last 100,000 years on that diagram um and you can see here um we've got uh early neander here we've got cadway uh Sana elens Fontaine both theyed only around 100,000 years old um the nangong fossils omok kibish now I have got a kind of African origin here for Homo sapiens coming out of omo um which is fine but there were no ancestors where from where I could derive so there was nothing in Africa at this time with the dating we had that actually looked like it could be a precursor for omo1 in particular it seemed to come out of nowhere and that's because fossils like Flores bad and jood which we now know are 250 to 300,000 years old then they were dated at maybe 40 or 50,000 years old so they didn't make credible ancestors for Homo sapiens they couldn't do with the chronology we were working with at the time and the SCH cap humans were only dated at about the same age maybe 40 or 50,000 years so this is what we had to work with and it's no wonder we couldn't make a credible model for Homo sapiens Origins so I started to look at size and shape analyses um um and that helped me start to disentangle the patterns a bit better in terms of what we were seeing in the data so from what was then called ala Homo sapiens so this would be things like cway and and petrona what what we might Now call hyanis or ranis those archaic sapiens had a long low cranial Vault smaller brains and a big face and then we had what I thought were two main Trends in human evolution from that possible ancestor we've got the trend towards the neander tiles where the Vault shape stays the same long and low but it gets bigger with a much bigger brain so there's change in Vault size and the main changes are in the shape of the face so here we've got the neander going off in that direction and then in the other direction we have an opposing Trend where the main changes are in the shape of the brain case becoming globular and the face stays similar but gets smaller and here we've got that trend of skul and cfay and the upper Paro lithics of Europe and Jeb Hood well there wasn't much I could do with jebo because again at 40,000 years it seemed to be similar in age to all the rest of all of these on the dating we had were all about 30,000 years apart so very difficult to make any evolutionary pattern with that kind of data but in the 1980s I got introduced to cladistics uh people like Bernard wood who's here um Peter Andrews Eric Delson um introduced me to cladistics and I started to look at the fossil record cladistically and starting to divide the groups up by their derived feat tees and so we've got something from 1983 here where um I'm actually going back or very cautiously at this stage going back to homon neand alenis as a distinct species after all Homo sapiens modern humans we're going to use that term and then I'm introducing this additional category resurrecting these old names for this group of petralona and broken Hill and elen's Fontaine that clearly weren't neales they weren't erectus they weren't sapiens so this idea this concept of hydis or rensis comes back in here uh to these models and then we get to 1987 and we heard about a lot about this yesterday really and the impact this paper made so 1987 mondre Eve hits the headlines so this paper in nature by can stoning and Wilson um did make a huge impact because here was here were people who were not looking at fossils at all in fact Alan Wilson said we don't need the fossils he he was really rather arrogant about the whole thing said we don't need the fossil we can get what's happening in human evolution just from work like this so they took mitochondrial DNA from the placentas from women around the world and with different Origins and they use PP a cladistic program phenetic analysis using psimon to build up a tree of all the mitochondrial DNA variants that went back in time reconstructing hypothetical ancestors further and further back in time until they arrived at one female ancestor and this ancestor became known as as mitochondrial eve uh although uh Rebecca K in particular insisted that it would be much better to call it a lucky mother this was just a woman who by luck and chance her mitochondrial DNA was the one that went on successfully to all the patterns uh that we find today and when they looked at the structure of the tree it was most parsimonious to originate that female ancestor in Africa and looking at mutation rates from many organisms that Wilson had been studying they concluded that that female ancest who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago so this was a recent African origin and moreover they argued that there was no sign of any contribution from older lineages such as the neander from homo rectus any of these other things so this was a recent African origin for Homo sapiens based on small bits of DNA as they were them from mitochondrial DNA so it was it was hugely controversial the search for Adam and Eve um scientists explore controversial theory about man's Origins um and I was drawn into that debate people made documentaries lots of coverage and I was able to quote my view that yes the fossil evidence actually matched this model and actually we've been saying for few years that it could well be an African origin for Homo sapiens and we also around this time got new dating for the schul and caps humans so as I mentioned they were thought to be maybe 40 50,000 years old but new work started to be applied um Helen valadas and colleagues Ry grun who here Henry Schwarz and I were involved in some of this work and that's actually rer at Cass cave many years ago um and so the view in 1985 was that we had the neander TOs in Western Asia and then they were followed by early Homo sapiens whose Gan CF so Clark how was able to say yes this is an evolution in Western Asia from neand to Homo sapiens but then the dates for cfay came through uh from luminescence dating putting it at about 100,000 years so this was kind of starting to turn the the pattern on its head and so we started started to work as well on sites such as school and the school material also turned out to be much older than expected and so we got a much more complex sequence here where certainly these Neals can't be the ancestors for the skur and cap people because they're there in Western Asia 100,000 years ago so putting this data together Peter Andrews and I wrote this paper um on the origin of modern humans from genetic and fossil ID and it's still by far my most highly cited paper um and it was very controversial as much so as the M Le paper of a year before um these are some of the printed comments about it impossible unscientific anti- evolutionary divisive already falsified fatally flawed nonsense a great Bap backward that's luring brace uh implying apply toine Holocaust that's mil wof so it was very strongly criticized and it took a many years for the ripples of all this to die down much worse was said in person or in correspondents uh I have to say uh and and I sometimes gave back as good as I got it didn't help that the media just loved to stir this up you know they would phone me up and say we've just spoken to bill for bup puff and he said and then I would get angry say well and so they fueled this debate and made it worse um but the paper really if you haven't read it have a look at it um it wasn't as Extreme as it's been portrayed really what we said in the paper was there are many different views on where Homo sapiens came from um and we don't know which are correct but we're going to take two very different views where the contrast allow us to test them against the data and we'll see which of those two models looks like the best fit and of course we decided that a recent African origin was the best fit to the data from the fossil and from the developing genetic data um but we didn't say there was no interbreeding we didn't say there had to be a complete replacement but we did say a recent African origin is the best supported model so I was able to start modifying that size and shape diagram with those new chronological developments and with my more hide against his fossils are older um we've got SCH and CF older at about 100,000 years and Je Hood could fit into an African archaic sapiens group along with things like omo 2 and unala um as the potential ancestors for those modern humans that came later and the neand are going off in their own evolutionary Direction and so today yes there is only one human species Homo sapiens also known as modern humans and although I'm trying to get away from this usage of archaic and modern um because it's a common usage I'm going to stick with it for this talk but I think there are issues on on calling all of these other humans archaic so for example the neales are highly derived and evolved in their own way and I think it's it's probably wrong to call them archaic humans but that I I will stick with archaic and modern for the for the purposes of this talk so of course we come in many different SS and shapes and colors around the world but if we strip away all those superficial features and get down to the skeleton um we have this common sceletal pattern that we find in Homo sapiens um this long and rather lean body narrow hipped narrow shouldered the cranial Vault of course with the high and rounded scull chin on the lower jaw small brow ridges and so on so we can look in the fossil record for these features and see when and where they first evolved and amazingly even 100,000 years ago we know there were at least five kinds of humans around on the earth so we had been evolving in Africa the neand have been evolving in Europe and Asia we've learned in the last 13 years about the denans over in East Asia and these strange dwarf species in Southeast Asia homol lenensis and Homo floresiensis so at least five kinds of humans 100,000 years ago and yet by the time we get to 30,000 years ago as far as we know all those other humans are gone and we're just left on our own on planet Earth and we heard a great talk from Tom Heim yesterday where Tom went over the dating of the neand and their disappearance and so as far as we can say the nees had gone from at least the major parts of Europe that we can look at by 40,000 years ago and we don't know when the denans and lenis and homesan died out but certainly there's no reasonable evidence that I can see that they were still around 30,000 years ago so probably we were alone in the world by 30,000 years ago so here's a an update of a diagram from a paper with Julia and James Cole and myself um and this is an updated version of it and it shows you these different lineages Through Time These Bars um I regard most of them as distinct species and I'm going to concentrate on these ones here in the last 500,000 years or so the homo sapiens group The Neal group and the group of denans and Chinese fossils and other fossils in Asia that might be denant so these are the ones I'm going to talk about now interesting as they are I haven't got tied it go about n and and Flores and and and lenensis unfortunately so we look at the story in Africa and and it's developing complexity so again going back 20 years this is from a paper on the herto material from nature in 2003 and uh we've got cab as the potential ancestor dated then at about 500,000 years in this in this paper in 2003 going through a form like herto early Homo sapiens through to the later Homo sapiens form in this case one of the C humans so we've got a single evolution a gradual process probably happening in one region of Africa most likely East Africa but we know it's much more complicated than that now we know that 300,000 years ago there were at least three kinds of humans around in Africa so homo sapiens at least probably an early form of homo sapiens represented by jood and Flores bad is present at opposite ends of the African continent and we've got the work I've done with r a grun and colleagues the cadway fossil dated now at only about 300,000 years ago and we've got of course homon nedi down in southern Africa dated at around the same time about 300,000 years ago so there's all this diversity uh that we didn't know about in Africa and we heard yesterday from Ellie and she's LED this great work in the last few years looking at what we can call a African sometimes multi-regional African I think we're try to not use that word because of its confusion with the global multi-regional model so panafrican I think is a better term for this model um and then we had this paper in Trends and ecology and evolution did our species evolve in subdivided populations across Africa and why does it matter and here's a quote from Ellie um humans did not stem from a single ancestral population in one region of Africa as is often claimed instead our African ancestors were diverse in form and culture and Scattered across the entire continent I'm not sure about entire but certainly most of the continent probably and so we've got these different lineages through time sometimes they go their own way sometimes they go extinct those that survive sometimes climate moves them around they're in contact with each other so at times they exchange genes and ideas at other times they go their separate ways and gradually particularly in the last 100,000 years we get a coalesence of the pattern that we call modern humans behaviorally and anatomically and even more complex models are around so this is a really interesting paper by ragy and colleagues uh last year um and you can see the complexity of these populations in Africa and these are models of course but these are the models that were their best models for the fit of the existing genetic data uh and this is my comment on it ragdale and colleagues conclude that their best supportive models indicate a weakly structured split in early Homo sapiens in Africa more than 400,000 years ago into geographically separate stem lineages one and two which then remained in intermittent genetic contact with each other so a really complex model here and it's really worth looking at this this work and so when did we find something that we can call a modern human anatom i al well for me the omok kibish skeleton is is the oldest known what we could call anoscopy Modern Homo sapiens Homo sapiens of modern type on the parts preserved it is only a partial skeleton but the cranial vault is high and rounded the brow rides small and divided there's a chin on the lower jaw there's expanded parietals um there's now a pelvis which found in 2001 and as it says here the om one hit bone is modern human in appearance it has modern human apomorphies um the hipbone is within the range of recent human variations so this hoc kibish fossil which rer talked about the dating of yesterday there is a claim this paper in nature that it could be over 230,000 years old uh rer expressed his doubts about that but even if we don't accept that age here's the original dating from a few years earlier by Brown and colleagues the Oman fossil have an age of at least 172,000 and given the deposition in enironment of kibish Member One probably closer to 196,000 years om one is therefore the oldest secur dat fossil evidence of anatomically modern humans so that for me is still true and then again Ellie with Manuel will and using the excellent Rocky double database um looking here at cultural change in Africa and we see this really complex pattern again of different features and we're looking here at symbolic markings the use of ochre the use of shell beads ostrich egg shell beads uh halfed technology how it comes and goes through the record in Africa things appear and then disappear again and then reappear again so this pattern again is very complex it mirrors what I think we we see to an extent in the fossil record and here uh Ellie and Manuel is saying while much emphasis has been given to Innovation and variability in the middlestone age record long periods of stasis and a lack of cumulative developments argue further against a strictly gradualistic nature in the record instead we're confronted with Humanity's deep variegated roots in Africa and a dynamic metapopulation that took many Millennia to reach the critical mass capable of producing the ratchet effect commonly used to Define contemporary human culture so a complex picture in the behavioral record as well as the the fossil record so we haven't mentioned the DNA much and it's going to become important now in this story we mentioned it with mitochondrial eve but of course we've got those mitochondria inherited through females mothers to daughters we've got the Y chromosome DNA inherited fathers to sons and then we've got the rest of the genome so this becomes important in in what comes next so we're looking now at data from Europe and Asia about the neand in the earliest homos ipens outside of Africa so we've got this wonderful sample from the Soros at ATA and it's a shame that none of the uh the core members of the Atura team could come to the meeting because they've got such wonderful material over 6,000 human fossils found deep in this chamber in the in this cave system at Al Pua uh 28 individuals represented every part of the skeleton represented and even DNA so some bone fragments as Matias uh showed uh and colleagues have DNA and it that DNA shows that these are early on the Neal Lage so these are at least in terms of of evolution early neops and we also see that in the morphology of the specimens because the teeth in particular are Ultra neander tole uh and that becomes important with something I'm going to say a bit later so this seems to be the beginning of the neand old lineage at least by 430,000 years ago in Europe so there we've got a representation so we can talk about basil neand hols and deriv Neals over a period of more than 400,000 years but it's more complicated as we heard yesterday because Karina and and colleagues including me and Rina have looked at this back of a skull from epida epida one from from Greece and in terms of its shape it certainly doesn't look Neal or against it's like its closest resemblances are to fossils like School 5 so at least on the parts preserved this seems to be a homo sapiens fossil and rer uh and colleagues dated it at more than 200,000 years old so this seems to be an early dispersal of homo sapiens from Africa as far as Greece we don't know how much further these people went we don't know how long they were around in Europe uh they can't just have been on I think on on a short visit there must be evidence of these people people somewhere else in Europe still to be found but it does make sense of some genetic data because geneticists have have shown and this was talked about this morning that there was a a meeting of neander early neander and early Homo sapiens somewhere which meant that neander picked up some of the genetic makeup of homo sapiens in the mitochondrial DNA and their yism DNA maybe around 300,000 years ago so perhaps epida is is a representative of one of these populations that went out of Africa early on and mixed with the neand but there's this major dispersal that again we heard about this morning the one that gives rise to the genetic diversity outside of Africa today and it happened estimated around 50 to 60,000 years ago the genetic ancestry consistent with deriving from a major worldwide dispersal less than 60,000 years ago so this is from my paper with in mataya and Ellie and pontis and these are fossils of early Homo sapiens outside of Africa that have had their genomes examined and they they are part of this late relatively late Out of Africa dispersal starting around 60,000 years ago but of course there's evidence that there were earlier dispersers and I've just mentioned the epidem one over 200,000 years ago but there's also growing evidence that there are early Homo sapiens fossils in China more than 880,000 years old um and there's an arrival of somebody in Australia um about 65,000 years ago because the site of Mag baby 2 has got complex technology and the use of pigments and so on dated at around 65,000 years so we assume that was Homo sapiens although Tom Heim raised the issue maybe we shouldn't assume it was homo sapians but that's my working assumption but it obviously will be important to get more evidence of this ear dispersal not everyone agrees with that date some people challenge the early dating a MAG Bey and think it's not as old as 65,000 years but there were these early dispersals and we talked in the meeting about success and failure can we call these failed Homo sapiens disperses because they didn't take hold outside of Africa it was only the one after 60,000 I think we have to be careful about making these judgments about failures and success we're going to fail one day maybe fairly soon who knows um so meeting the neand was coming out of Africa in that event meant that we were going into the territory of the neand and so we've argued about this a lot and right back to the beginning of my career we were arguing about whether we interent bread within the andar um and uh people argued that for example this uh child skeleton from Portugal the leedo lello child was a Neal human hybrid um this is very unlikely unfortunately the DNA has never been recovered it would be nice to see a really good try at that to test this idea but this fossil is only about 26,000 years old so it's far too late to be any credible hybrid the neiles had gone more than 10,000 years before this child was alive so it can't really be any kind of credible H hybrid and morphologically I I'd never thought it was any kind of hybrid but what I did think was that yes we and the Ant were closely related I knew that uh things like brown bears and polar bears which regard as different species can successfully hybridize so can jack was and wolves so can species of baboon in Africa so I thought hybridization was possible but I always thought that it wouldn't have been normal behavior for us in the anderes it would have been a rare event and it was 40 or 50,000 years ago we're never going to find any trace of it today so that was my view but of course I was wrong about that and uh this paper in science began to show that in 2010 um as it says here the long waited sequence of neol genome suggests that modern humans in NE into breed tens of thousands of years ago perhaps in the Middle East as a result and I've added in most in fact pretty well everyone living outside of Africa has inherited a small but significant amount of DNA from these extinct humans it's it's at the level of around 2% in people outside of Africa today so the idea is that yes the neander souls went their own way we have populations evolving in Africa some of them not meeting the neales but the small group that gets out of Africa maybe 60,000 years ago goes into Western Asia picks up some Neal DNA through inter breeding and then takes that DNA with them as they spread around the rest of the world and I and Lucille CR have have done this review paper which is worth a look if you get time where we review some of this evidence and of course it's all already out of date even from a year ago there's new dater but this looks at some of those populations and we heard from uh Matt Pope about the Lotus bellab material where we seem to have what were thought to be nandal teeth but when they're studied in detail and work led by Tim Compton we see that actually there's a kind of mixed morphology in those teeth they seem to have both neik and Homo sapiens like features so it will be great if we can get DNA from these teeth and that's hopefully going to be attempted so soon so this brings up the thorny question of species we go back full circle to 50 years ago and are the neant is just a form of homo sapiens um I certainly don't think so and this is just a piece I wrote on the Neal and and Neals is the same species as us from the Natural History Museum website and what I've said there in my view if Neal and Homo sapiens remain separate long enough to evolve such distinctive skull shape pelvises and ear bones they can be regarded as different species into breeding or not behavior is similar or not so that is that is my view and it's been put much better in this paper by Andrew Andrew menagen and mimo Bernardi uh I suggest you get a look at this paper were NE andas and Homo sapiens good species it's an excellent piece of work and Andrew is in the audience somewhere um yeah over there um so this is definitely worth a look because it really goes into this question in depth so let's look quickly at the denans who occupied sites in East Asia and almost certainly southeast Asia over many Millennia so we've only learned about him in the last 13 years Russian archaeologists have been digging Denis ofay for about 50 years they' found Rich foral remains Rich archaeological remains and some very fragmentary human remains and in 2010 they started to give up their DNA and showed that we had a new kind of human so this tiny bit of finger produced a a really high quality Genome of another kind of human not neand not Homo sapiens and these became known as the denans and uh the strateg graphy at the site there are several Chambers and we heard from uh Matias about the sediment DNA that's showing this long record of occupation by both denans and Ne andares at the site uh over more than 150,000 years with Homo sapiens coming in late into the sequence and a wonderful review paper that's just appeared more than a decade of genetic research on the denin by perin salon and Kelo and my networking let me down in this case because uh for the last few months I was working on a review paper about the denans and unfortunately as soon as I saw this it went straight in the bin because there was no way I could have written something as good as they've done about the denans it's really a wonderful a wonderful piece of work so this is the fragmentary material of denans and there is an unpublished cranial fragment as well and here are the nambol fragments based on DNA and of course the remarkable occurrence of from this bone fragment Denis 11 this is a girl who lived maybe a 100 thousand years ago and the DNA shows that she had um a neand mother and a denan father so these populations were actually into breeding in the vicinity of Denis of cave and this girl is a first generation hybrid between those two so who else in Europe in Asia might be a denan um well this jawbone from Jah on the Tibetan pla of China um no DNA from it it's more than 150,000 years old but it's got massive molers very robustly built um and it got proteomic material a bit of proteomic material which allies it to the denisbin rather than to neales or homo sapiens so this is a probable denan it's morphologically similar to this jawbone from off the coast of Taiwan from penu this also could be a denan if Jah is a denan and we've got this tooth from La um on morfology it's similar to these specimens and might well be a denan from Laos and then we've got these other fosses in Asia the nadaa fossil maybe 300,000 years old could that be a denin the Harbin beautiful Harbin fossil that we heard about from uh jiuni we worked together with Chinese colleagues on describing this wonderful fossil the darly fossil specimens like zual no DNA from these fossils but some of them probably are denans so we will start to learn more about the disant as DNA work and proteomic work proceeds on particularly these Chinese fossils so that's a network diagram I put together I have to keep updating it but it shows you the kind networks we can build up from deniss of cave based on DNA found today based on morphology of fossils and of course in particular what's interesting is this much higher level of denan like DNA in the populations of Ireland southeast Asia and austral Asia there they you can find a level in the Philippines as well in some populations of about 4% of denivan like DNA which is added to the 2% of Neal DNA that they've also got so the denisovans almost certainly were living somewhere down here as well and contributing their DNA as homo saans dispersed through that region and people have modeled the possible range of denan so this is work by ran and colleagues published recently where they're hypothesizing that what was controlling the meeting or separation of neand and denans in Eurasia was the climate so during cold stages these populations were separated from each other but during warmer stages we get a convergence and we get the potential for interbreeding between the neander and denisovans and they're modeling here potentially a very wide range for the denisovans uh across much of Northern Eurasia so this is certainly very testable from archaeology and from future discoveries so concluding remarks and ongoing issues I have to skate through these so looking at the common ancestor of us in the andales I used to think it was homy ofis I don't think that anymore as it says here me me saying this the nature of the last common ancestor of us in the andales is uncertain and where it lived is also uncertain I used to think it was harder against is living in Africa I'm no longer sure and I'm no longer sure of the date of that common ancestor either so we heard from uh pontis and and from a Time and Mata about this ancestry of us and the adal and denans so here's a quote from from our paper uh well actually first the quote from Leu and colleagues from the level of shared genetic variance archaic humans are estimated to have separated from modern humans about 550,000 years ago with neand and denan splitting from each other about 400,000 years ago and and then from our paper the origins of modern human ancestors the ancestors of neons and JIS are estimated to diver from the ancestors of modern humans between 500 and 700,000 years ago but we did add this rejoinder or at least you know the geneticist and the authorship added this rejoinder although it's commonly believed that both the Nissans and the anatar derive the majority of their ancestry from the middle archaic population it may be possible that the inferred archaic modern human Divergence is due to to just statistical averaging of the super archaic and recent gene flow ancestries no middle population and expansion of the anal ancestors between 500,000 and 700,000 years ago will be necessary in that alternative scenario so there's a caveat here that that might not be necessarily the actual common ancestral date and that's important because there is dispute about this and uh we've got Aida's really interesting paper here on Dental morphology where she in particular used the SE delos material so that wonderful sample from seim delos about 430,000 years old it's very neander in its in its morphology um and so using that she's using constant evolutionary rates to project back how far they would have been a common ancestor for us and the neander and what she says is I showed that any Divergence time between the anes of modern humans younger than 800,000 years would have ined unexpectedly rapid Dental evolution in early Neals from the Sim delos these results support a pre 800,000 year old last common ancestor andless hither to unexplained mechanisms sped up Dental evolution in early neand and then the work that I was involved with with xun and colleagues on the Harbin fossil so here are the philogen that XI Yun constructed and you can see here the Divergence dates for the Harbin and Theo groups from Homo sapiens are close to a million years and uh zong quotes back our quote back to us here um however it's possible that the younger estimated Divergence dates are an artifact of statistical averaging between super arcade and recent gflow events so I think it's an open question when that last common ancestor lived and this is really interesting work for the future because of course if the ancestor was around a million years ago then fossils like this come into play as perhaps being close to the ancestral population uh and Africa is you know sometimes rather obscure fossils such as daaka buoya and tigf also known as Turnin these might come into play as potential ancestors or close to it we've got homo intercessor of course at about 850,000 years old in uh in Europe and the neglected Jun yarm material from China about 900,000 years old so maybe these should also be considered in these arguments discussions about our last common ancestor and getting to the end now um this whole question about what is a homo sapiens obviously that's been part of my work since my PhD um and it's still a an open question about how we diagnose what is homo sapiens it's easy to diagnose the modern Homo sapiens pattern we can do that with that globular brain case here it is with SCH and cfay close by there are modern humans we can do it with ear bones we can show that the inner and middle ear bones of recent Homo sapiens are very distinct from the out for example but when we look at the older Homo sapiens it gets more problematic because here number one this group includes Jeb hood and omo 2 in fact Jeb Hood one the two crania from Jeb hood and omo 2 are actually more like erectus and neols in their braincase shape they don't show the braincase shape the globular brain shape cap sapiens and yet many of us including me call them early Homo sapiens so braan shape alone won't don't determine what a homo sapiens is we have to broaden out how we diagnose Homo sapiens if if these really are early Homo sapiens it must be more than just having a glob braincase so haven't got time to go into this but one of those big questions is why are we the last humans what happened to the others and here just for the neand some of the views uh we were to blame for their extinction because we were better hunters and out competed them the andales were affected by Vol caring capacity climate change likely iced the neales out of existence Neal Extinction may have been caused by sex not fighting that was based on that paper by lucil and I where we suggested that small groups of neons were absorbed into the homo sapiens groups and they went extinct really that way um Homo sapiens developed a new ecological niche that separated it from other homins the work of people like Patrick Roberts there um differences in the brains um the neand were uh their end was linked to a flip of the Earth's magnetic poles about 42,000 years ago some of us in this room and online um wrote a rejoinder to that model we we don't really we don't buy that at all um do we ow our Evolution success to cooperation it's a very nice idea well we a more efficient kind of human and I think this one is certainly worth exploring energetics that there's evidence that NE andales and Homo erectus had lung capacity 20% bigger than ours they were very demanding of their environment they had bigger organs so maybe we are just a more efficient kind of human which means you can obviously have more humans out of any given environment with that more efficient lifestyle and that more efficient physiology that homo sapiens developed so it could of course be a combination of these The Disappearance of NE antil and then we've got to explain The Disappearance of denans and floresiensis and lenensis as well and of course proteomics a great hope for the future DNA of course is limited in its scope we've got that DNA from 430,000 years ago from the se suos but that's really exceptional most of the DNA recovery uh is more recent and requires really good environments such as in the cold conditions of Denis of cave so proteomics is is a real hope for the future that we will start to be able to reach back and get genetic data from Pomo erectus Hy against this and so on that will start to build up a network based not on just the fossils but also on uh proteomic data and a lot of work going on and growing amounts of work on looking at how to actually tell what bits of DNA are making us Homo sapiens which bits of DNA make a chimpanzee a chimpanzee a boba a boba a gorilla a gorilla what makes what DNA makes a denan a denan what DNA makes a nean neol this is fantastic work for the future and it's certainly work that will become increasingly important and of course finally we've heard about all those gaps on the map there's so many parts of the world where we have only a very limited fossil record and people in this room are working on some of those gaps and trying to fill some of those gaps um but those gaps are really important that we fill because an knowledge of human evolution is still based on a very partial and potentially very biased record so finally we get to mostly Out of Africa at last um so this is an old slide of mine from uh a paper I wrote 2012 but saying there to conclude we homosapians are not more or less 100% recent African origin as I would have said 20 years ago in our DNA we're more than 90% recent African origin so we're mostly Out of Africa I used to say mainly Out of Africa I think it was fanty who first said the nice phrase mostly Out of Africa so there we are and thank you all for listening thank you to all my collaborators to the conference organizers to the Natural History Museum my funders recently the cleaver Foundation the human Origins research fund all my collaborators sources of data and illustrations thank you for listening
