John --
The spread of pre-humans using Acheulean tools us believed to have
occurred about 500,000 years ago. Because the density of tools in
archeological digs is very high in parts of Africa -- and because
older Oldowan tools came from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, the
belief of anthropologists has been that humans came out of Africa.
In the 1940's Hallum Movius, a Harvard paleontologist, mapped where
Acheulian tools had been found, creating what is known as the Movius
Line. The National Science Foundation of China has the Movius Line
sketched out here:
National Science Foundation of China
"Bose Bifaces as Wonderful as Those from the West" (undated)
http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/e_nsfc/desktop/zn/cg/ddqq_011.htm
Incidentally, the Acheulian tools received their name because they
were first found in St. Acheul, in northern France (near Amiens). But
the movement of man is highly controversial, in part because there are
vast areas which have surprisingly yielded few such tools; in part
because the Bose tools from China may pre-date Acheulian tools, in
part because there are logical problems with the theories on spreading
of tools.
Christine Malcolm, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, has
an excellent overview of the development of Acheulian tools and issues
in these lecture notes:
University of Chicago
Lecture Notes (Nov. 17, 2003)
http://hominid.uchicago.edu/cmalcom/F03HOLec20ppt.pdf
The classical view on how migration occurred out of Africa is
reflected in these lecture notes, which note that the Sahara was more
habitable and that sea levels were lower, allowing transit into Europe
and Asia:
East Carolina University
"Lower Paleolithic" (Eastman, undated)
http://core.ecu.edu/anth/eastmanj/LowMidPaleo.htm
Alan Thorne who is an anthropologist with the Australian National
University in Canberra is quoted by author Bill Bryson in his book, "A
Short History of Nearly Everything," saying:
"There's just a whole lot we don't know about the movements of people . . .
People were moving all over the place, and where they met they almost
certainly share genetic material through interbreeding."
Google search strategy:
"Movius Line"
"Acheulian tools" + migration
Some additional maps can be generated with searches with Google image search:
Acheulian + map
Best regards,
Omnivorous-GA |
