New Georgian Homonid Rewrites Human Evolution Story

This is an interesting one. The Georgia site has given up some amazing fossils and evidence. The problem of the site is the large variance in features in the skulls found there(from the same strata time). Erectus seems to have been very variable at least there. There is a theory that the big differences seen in the robustness of one of the skulls in particular may suggest a bigger amount of sexual dimorphism going on. Males being much larger than females. This would further suggest if true that Erectus were more like gorillas, where one male has a harem of females, which would be different to us again. Moderns do have harems in different cultures alright, but it doesn't seem to be the norm, or at least moderns are more flexible in mating arrangements. Our sexual dimorphism is much less too.

I think one of the big problems with human evolution is the simple lack of fossils. Some homo are described just from one example and this is set as the type and indeed species. Now they can build ranges of features that would set out a skull as modern or erectus, but unlike in moderns where we have so much info I think it may muddy the waters sometimes with ancient remains. Who's to say this georgian egaster is not just a more gracile erectus within the normal erectus range. Or a female. If all you had found by pure chance were male skulls(and without a fully articulated skeleton you may never know) and a female showed up, you could well find yoruself believing it was a different species if you didn't know the gender. Smaller brow ridges, thinner skull bones, smaller teeth are all thinsg that would lead you to believe that.

I would suspect though that the find is correct, that homo left africa earlier than suspected and traveled further too. I'd put good money that the earliest versions of us, sapiens did the same. Even as far back as 300,000 years ago, with a migration at 200,000.

I would put a bet down here that in the next 20 years we'll find an example of an evolved erectus along the lines of neandertal in europe, in somewhere like asia. I would not be too shocked to find erectus in australia, or even the americas either.