In the 1960s–1990s, the Joint Soviet-Mongolian and Russian-Mongolian-American Expeditions were working in Mongolia. The field works of those expeditions resulted in the discovery of over 1,500 Paleolithic localities not older than 1 Ma. At the present time, archeologists do not regard Central Asia as a center of anthropogenesis. Archaeological studies in the Zhoukoudian Cave in China were of great importance for the solution of the problem of anthropogenesis. The 44 individuals. For a long time, Sinanthropus was considered to be one of the oldest links in the human lineage.

 

Upon the discovery by R. Dart of the Australopithecus bone remains in the eastern part of the Kalahari Desert in 1925, the first place among the geographic regions, claiming the status of the ancestral home of humans, was granted to Africa. Over the following 80 years, hundreds of Australopithecus bone remains of various degrees of preservation were found in Southern and Eastern Africa. The taxonomy of the Australopithecines was reviewed in hundreds of publications; various species and genera were singled out and their phylogenic interrelationships were identified. The time of existence for the Australopithecus was 7 (6) – 2.5 (1.5) Ma BP. The Australopithecines are classified into three main groups: early, gracile, and robust.

 

Thus, 6–7 Ma BP, two lineages got branched from a common ancestor: apes and Australopithecines linked to human evolution. Therefore, it is not correct to state that humans originated from apes: rather, we have a common ancestor.

 

TWO GLOBAL HUMAN MIGRATIONS IN EURASIA

 

Over the recent 20–30 years, archeologists, anthropologists, geneticists and other scientists have finally determined Africa to be the ancestral home of humans (Fig. 1).

 

The most ancient human sites with stone tools (choppers, chopping tools, spheroids, polyhedrons, and roughly retouched flakes) are located mostly in Eastern Africa in the area of the East-African Rift, which is stretching longitudinally from the Dead Sea through the Red Sea and further over the territories of Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. In the Kada Gona River basin, 15 stratified sites and the sites with the surface location of artifacts have yielded over three thousand artifacts (Semaw, 2000).

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