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Robert Wilde

Face of the Earliest European?

By , About.com Guide   May 16, 2009

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Forensic scientist Richard Neave has used his skills on the remains of the earliest modern Homo sapien (human) yet found in Europe to produce a clay replica of what their face would look like. You can see it here. The remains include part of a skull and a jawbone, but we don’t know if it’s male or female. As the skull was found near the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, and as radiocarbon dates put the fragments at 34,000 – 36,000 years old, it has been called the first known European. There are differences with humans from our time - the cranium and molars are bigger - but it still looks recognisable as human.

Comments

May 18, 2009 at 1:01 pm
(1) Kris Stevenson :

Skull type can determine broad racial classification, Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid. To suggest (if they are) that the earliest Europeans were Negroid (going by that picture) would probably involve having to re-write Out of Africa theory completely. As in most cases there is a big difference between the evidence and the interpretation or spin put on it. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair both claimed the Human Genome Project proved race doesn’t exist, obviously neither had actually read the findings of the project or if they had chose to lie instead.

From what I understand proto-Caucasians had already developed in the Near East around 100,000 years ago. Since it is believed modern humans migrated to Europe, Central Asia and the Far East from a source in the Near East beginning 50,000 years ago these folks were presumably proto-Caucasian (note not white or Europoid but sharing a similar morphology, although most early modern skulls don’t match completely with any modern racial group). Proto-Caucasian skulls supply the earliest modern human remains in the Far East; Mongoloid skulls don’t appear until around 10,000 years ago towards the end of the LGM.

A dark skinned proto-Caucasoid entering Europe c.40,000BC is plausible, someone who looks like they have just come from the Congo is stretching the evidence beyond credibility.

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