Imagine that! The timelines of human evolution just magically changed again! And it’s really not good news for the Neo-Darwinians or the Modern Synthesis, while it simultaneously highlights the importance of Probability Zero and its mathematical approach to evolution.
A stunning discovery in a Moroccan cave is forcing scientists to reconsider the narrative of human origins. Unearthed from a site in Casablanca, 773,000-year-old fossils display a perplexing blend of ancient and modern features, suggesting that key traits of our species emerged far earlier and across a wider geographic area than previously believed…
The find directly challenges the traditional “out-of-Africa” model, which holds that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago before migrating and replacing other hominin species. Instead, it supports a more complex picture where early human populations left Africa well before fully modern traits had evolved, with differentiation happening across continents.
“The fossils show a mosaic of primitive and derived traits, consistent with evolutionary differentiation already underway during this period, while reinforcing a deep African ancestry for the H. sapiens lineage,” Hublin added.
Detailed analysis reveals the nuanced transition. One jaw shows a long, low shape similar to H. erectus, but its teeth and internal features resemble both modern humans and Neanderthals. The right canine is slender and small, akin to modern humans, while some incisor roots are longer, closer to Neanderthals. The molars present a unique blend, sharing traits with North African teeth, the Spanish species H. antecessor and archaic African H. erectus.
The fossils are roughly contemporaneous with H. antecessor from Spain, hinting at ancient interconnections. “The similarities between Gran Dolina and Grotte à Hominides are intriguing and may reflect intermittent connections across the Strait of Gibraltar, a hypothesis that deserves further investigation,” noted Hublin.
Dated by the magnetic signature of the surrounding cave sediments, the Moroccan fossils align with genetic estimates that the last common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans lived between 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. This discovery gives a potential face to that mysterious population.
The research, suggests that modern human traits did not emerge in a single, rapid event in one region. Instead, they evolved gradually and piecemeal across different populations in Africa, with connections to Eurasia, deep in the Middle Pleistocene.
This sort of article really underlines the nature of the innumeracy of the archeologists as well as the biologists. It’s not that they can’t do the basic arithmetic involved, it’s that they have absolutely no idea what the numbers they are throwing around signify, or understand the necessary second- and third-order implications of changing both their numbers and their assumptions.
For example, the reason the Out of Africa hypothesis was so necessary to the evolutionary timeline is because it kept the whole species in a nice, tight little package, evolving together and fixating together over time. But geographic dispersion necessarily prevents universal fixation. So, let’s take a look at how this new finding changes the math, because it is a significant complication for the orthodox model.
If human traits were evolving “gradually and piecemeal across different populations” spanning Africa and Eurasia as early as 773,000 years ago, then fixation had to occur separately in each isolated population before those populations could contribute to modern humans. This isn’t parallel processing that helps the model, it’s the precise opposite. Each isolated population is a separate fixation bottleneck that must be traversed independently.
Consider the simplest case: two isolated populations (Africa and Eurasia) that occasionally reconnect. For a trait to become universal in modern humans, one of two things must happen:
- Independent fixation: The same beneficial mutation arises and fixes independently in both populations. This requires the fixation event to happen twice, which squares the improbability.
- Migration and re-fixation: The mutation fixes in one population, then migrants carry it to the other population, where it must fix again from low frequency. This doesn’t doubles the time requirement since the allele must go from rare-to-fixed twice in sequence.
If there were n substantially isolated populations contributing to modern human ancestry, and k of the 20 million fixations had to spread across all of them through migration and re-fixation, the time requirement multiplies accordingly.
The “mosaic” of traits—some modern, some archaic, some Neanderthal-like, some unique—found in the Moroccan fossils suggest that different features were fixing in different populations at different times, which is what one would expect. The eventual modern human phenotype was assembled from contributions across multiple semi-isolated groups. However, this means the 20 million fixations weren’t a single sequential process in a single lineage. They were distributed across multiple populations that had to:
- Fix different subsets of mutations locally
- Reconnect through migration
- Allow the locally-fixed alleles to spread and fix in the combined population
- Repeat for 773,000+ years
Let’s say there were effectively 3 semi-isolated populations contributing to modern human ancestry: North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Eurasia. This is the absolute minimum number. If half of the 20 million fixations had to spread across population boundaries after initially fixing locally, that’s 10 million alleles requiring a second fixation event after migration reintroduced them at low frequency.
The time requirement approximately doubles for those 10 million alleles (first fixation + migration + second fixation), while the original problem remains for the other 10 million.
Original shortfall: ~150,000-fold (from MITTENS)
Revised shortfall with geographic structure: ~300,000 to 450,000-fold
But this understates the issue. The real problem is that geographic structure reduces effective population size locally while increasing it globally.
- Small local populations mean more drift, which sounds helpful for fixation
- But small local populations also mean more mutations are lost to drift before they can spread
- And the global population that must eventually carry the fixed allele is larger than any local population, meaning the final fixation is harder
The multiregional model doesn’t help Neo-Darwinism. It creates a nested fixation problem: alleles must fix locally (possible but slow), then spread through migration (slow), then fix in the receiving population (slow again), then spread further (slow), until global fixation is achieved (slowest of all).
The mathematical impossibility of TENS was just multiplied by at least a factor of 3. Notice how every time they find new evidence and adjust the narrative to accommodate it, they make the mathematical problem worse. The Moroccan fossils can’t save Neo-Darwinism. They’re just another shovel of dirt on the coffin.