The Herto fossils will have a tremendous impact on a long-standing debate in palaeoanthropology: “When, where and how did modern humans arise?”
Two competing theories have been slugging it out for more than twenty years. The first is the “multiregional” hypothesis, which argues that Homo sapiens arose from Homo erectus ancestors in many parts of the Old World simultaneously over a time span of hundreds of thousands of years. Among the most vocal champions of this theory are Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Alan Thorn of the Australian National University in Canberra.
The rival…
