ANTHROPOGENESIS AND DISPERSION

OF ANCIENT HOMO POPULATIONS IN EURASIA

The human origin, just like the origin of life, is one of the fundamental issues of science, for several hundreds of years not only challenging scientists but also intriguing the minds of many other people. Two main aspects of this problem have to be highlighted.

Firstly, the regions of human origins have to be identified as well as the migration routes of the ancient peoples.

Secondly, scientists are to find out when and where the anatomically modern humans of Homo sapiens type have evolved and where and how they dispersed over our planet.

The origins and dispersion of ancient humans over the Earth had a cosmic significance, as with the appearance of humans a new stage in the evolution of biosphere started – the anthropogenic stage, as Academician A.P. Pavlov, a geologist, named it in 1922, or noosphere, according to V.I. Vernadski and P. Teilhard de Chardin.

In 1859, a book “On the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin, an outstanding nature scientist, was published, in which he formulated the main points of the theory of evolution, which was based on the mechanism of natural selection. A yet greater effect had his publication “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex ”, which came out in 1871. In 1863 Ernst Haeckel, one of the followers of the theory of evolution and a talented naturalist, stated in his lecture delivered at the meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians in Stettin, that humans descended from apes. For, an intermediate link had to be found to support this hypothesis. Haeckel even gave a name to the creature – an apeman, devoid of the speech ability, or Pithecanthropus alatus.

There were several viewpoints regarding the possible geographical centers of anthropogenesis. Southeast Asia was pointed to as to one of such regions. In 1891, a Dutch scientist E. Dubois discovered the remains of a primitive hominoid, Pithecanthropus, on Java Island, which discovery allowed him to speak about the existence of an intermediate link between apes and humans.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Central Asia was considered as the ancestral home for humans by many researchers. In the 1920s, the American Central Asian Expedition led by R.Ch. Andrews made many important discoveries, including a large dinosaur cemetery in Bain-Dzak locality; however, the expedition participants did not fulfill the main task: they did not find the ancestral home of humans in Central Asia.