Why do I keep seeing that modern humans only left Africa 40,000 years ago from science journalists?

Question

Don't they read? There were modern Australoid humans in South America 45,000 years ago, and buried under the mount Toba ash from 74,000 years ago. Why the persistance of this date? It's easily twice as old.

Answer 1

While I feel I have to point out the highly contested nature of any evidence suggesting human presence in the Americas before 12,000 years ago (not that there isn't any, it's just contested like crazy, for a variety of good and bad reasons)...

...I'd say the news journals are doing this for the same reason they misquote a lot of other scientific knowns. They are most likely playing it safe, safer than the average person would play it. It's one thing to hold back from confirming something, it's quite another to have to make a reversal if you've overstepped your bounds, especially for an entity like a news journal. They don't just get to shrug their shoulders like we do and move on.

Answer 2

In my human population lecture last week I was told humans estimated to have left Africa 70,000 yrs ago

Answer 3

It's all speculation, nobody can accurately judge when people went there, did this, discovered that etc.

was thinking the same thing bob

Answer 4

As I've often stated either 1.) sapien left Africa much longer ago than 100,000 BP or 2.) some gene introgression with archaic humans due to interbreeding happened.

The depiction of neandertal as a non thinking brute by the media & Abrahamic religions is probably the main reason so many modern Europeans recoil from any hypothesis indicating some neandertal or erectus gene introgression.

Any discovery challenging traditional views of human evolution is subjected to decades of peer review & testing to  prevent fraud.  Due to some early hoaxes the anthropological field has become ultra conservative & cautious about their sanctioned conclusons.

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/hybrid.htm

Many inconsistancies in the OOA hypothesis are overlooked, while any evidence to the contrary is "nit picked" to death.

Due to the number of genes more than 100,000 yrs old that appear in either Asians or Europeans, but are absent or rare in Africa, one must conclude some gene swapping between archaic homo types happened... both from & to sapien.

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/hegene.htm

Answer 5

Because Academics are stubborn as Jack ***'s and refuse to admit they are wrong or embrace new theory no matter how outlandish their present way of thinking. Theres plenty of examples ie., Sun rotates around the earth. Pyramids built by the Eygptians.

Answer 6

The simple answer is that many of the journalists who pick up these storties have no undertsanding of the material and don't catch errors when they see them.  Worse, they often have the same general impressions that their readers have, which are often way off.  They might not understand, for example, that humans and dinosaurs didn't live at the same time, or that there's a difference between a monkey and an ape, or like the creationists, they have no clue as top the actual timeframe of the earth, life on earth, or the human species.  Nor do they understand, like the creationsist here, the evidence for those dates that make it impossible for a reasonable person to argue that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.  Most of them don't understand where that date comes from itself.  The Bible gives no dates- all that was peiced together making MAJOR leaps of logic an assumptions, by Bishop Usher.  It's just one man's half-assed reading of the bible, not the bible itself, yet people cling to it as if it were scripture, and they dismiss the overwhelming evidence from chemistry, physics and geology that the earth is Billions of years old.

Answer 7

Maybe because the Caucasoid/Mongoloid split took place at that time near the Caspian Sea, and the journalists just figured that Africans took the "Red-eye" flight from Nairobi, that night, to Kazakhstan, and turned pale overnight, from that frightening experience (air travel, 40,000 BP)...

: -)

Answer 8

I think the 40,000 years is not a coincindence.  It happens to be the oldest date that Carbon 14 is effective at dating.  I think that and the fact that old ideas and orthodoxy die hard.  Typically, most archeological sites will not venture deeper than this due to money and saftey issues.  Clearly, aboriginies reached Australia at least 40,000 years ago.  I am certain they didn't migrate from Africa straight to Australia.  I get amuzed listening to some of the Discovery programs that indicate a migration from one fossil site to another as if we have fossil evidence of everyone that ever existed.  In reallity it is probably significantly less than one in a million.   I tend to think the 40,000 year history of humans in the Americas is probably closer to the truth, certainly than the 12,000.   If you propose something older than 12 thousand or so, you will get attacked by those whose claim to fame is they discovered the oldest and those that have taught that or believe it.   I personally think the out of Africa claim is rediculous since humans and or our near relatives have been in Eurasia for over a million years.  The lack of fossil evidence is simply a demonstration of the rarity of fossils, not an indication that they didn't live in Asia.  A recent H. antecesor was found in Spain over a million years old.  What more do they need?  The Out of Africa theory is so ingrained that it must be paid homage to in nearly every new discovery, even those in Eurasia, it seems.

Answer 9

That's funny. That date I have heard extended all the way to 200,000 years ago.

What journals are you reading?

Answer 10

How could that be when the Earth is only about 4,000 to 6,000 years old?

Don't mind the thumbs down.  I am a creationist, so therefore follow the Christian aspect of science.  Jesus put up with the thumbs downers too.

Answer 11

Maybe, 6 days X 6000 years + 4000 since the Bible first written = 40,000 years.  If you're not sure, this is for your amusement.  Laugh, grin or cry. Your happiness, I must try.

Answer 12

It depends when the information was printed remember that things are changing faster than they did 30 years ago.