Thus, neither archaeological nor paleoanthropogical data demonstrate that anatomically modern humans migrated from Africa and reached the Pacific coast. Neither Eve nor her Pleistocene descendants admired the Pacific dawns.

 

The Multiregional Hypothesis has several modifications. Its essence is that wherever Homo erectus populations existed, they might have evolved into those of anatomically modern humans. This hypothesis has been mostly supported by the archaeologists and anthropologists involved in Paleolithic studies in East and Southeast Asia.

 

One of the authors and principal advocates of the Multiregional hypothesis, M.H. Wolpoff (Wolpoff, Wu, Thorne, 1984; Wolpoff, 1989, 1992, 1998; Wolpoff, Caspari, 1996; Wolpoff, Hawks, Caspari, 2000; etc.) argues that multiregionalism does not imply that modern human populations originated in various regions of the world completely independently of one another and then evolved strictly in parallel. The theory allows for variously directed gene flow uniting all geographical populations into a single species (Wolpoff, Hawks, Caspari, 2000, p. 134).

 

I subscribe to the view that modern human populations may have originated from late archaic populations, and I will try to bring forward archaeological facts supporting this idea.

 

Apparently, different environmental conditions and other factors had produced their impact on the subsistence models and stone tool manufacture; hence anthropologically distinctive features might have developed. It is a possible explanation of both a mosaic pattern of the Middle Paleolithic industries and differences in the morphology among the representatives of certain human populations.

 

Archaeological excavations carried out in Africa and Eurasia have provided abundant materials that make it possible to forward a hypothesis about the existence of three large geographical zones where a process of the transition from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic took place under different conditions during the range of 100 – 30 ka BP and to propose three models of this development. Lithic industries were developed through convergent processes and the physical type of early humans evolved in these regions possibly resulting in the origin of anatomically modern humans.

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