Or, at least, he might not have been wrong when he held to the idea…
“That the human race started on some plateau in central Asia is almost certain” (Selected Letters III, p. 412)
Lovecraft was not alone in this. I note that in the 1920s Roy Chapman Andrews (the model for Indiana Jones) took an expedition to Mongolia, intending to find there the first traces of the human race. Also, the discovery of proto Indo-European (c. 4000 B.C.) had put the origins of the European languages mostly in a massive ancient migration to the Caucasus from the western Eurasian steppe, which would then place Mongolia as a theoretical lost origin-point further east. Apparently some linguists still see evidence for a distant Mongolian relationship for proto Indo-European, circa 12,000 B.C. So by the standards of his time, Lovecraft seems to have been thinking along the right lines.
But after Lovecraft’s death the consensus on human origins later shifted to Africa, based on the new post-war fossils, even though “consensus” should be a dirty word in rational science. Now comes a hint from this week’s New Scientist magazine (“The Search for Ancestor X”) that ideas may be changing based on new evidence…
The problem is that we appear to have fundamentally misunderstood the way human evolution works. “The idea humans originated from a small region [of Africa] doesn’t make much sense,” says Lounes Chikhi at the University of Toulouse, France. Chikhi says the genetic signals in living humans imply that H. sapiens emerged as a “metapopulation” spread over a wide geographical area where several “subpopulations” were interconnected by genetic exchange [presumably by early trade?]. Each of these subpopulations was characterised by a subtly distinct genetic signature — and potentially a subtly distinct look. [The article concludes that, on present evidence,] Ancestor X could have lived almost anywhere within a truly vast geographical region. … “it could have been in west Asia. It could even have been in east Asia. We just don’t know yet.” [the latter quote is from Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London].
The statements you quote here are curious. True, in say the 1950s, the popular model of human evolution was “multiregional”, where roughly Homo erectus spread across the Old World a million years ago or so and then the entire population evolved into Homo sapiens, more or less in synchrony due to genetic interchange between regions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregional_origin_of_modern_humans
The current model is a version of “recent African origin of modern humans”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans To state it accurately, the vast majority (95% or more) of current human genes come from expansion out of Africa starting around 65-50,000 years ago. As far as I know, the genetic evidence from both living and dead humans solidly confirms this.
The complication that makes it impossible to make neat, absolute statements is that the humans expanding out of Africa interbred to a small degree with the populations of pre-Homo sapiens that were already present. The most striking contribution is 1-4% of the genes of humans who exited sub-Saharan Africa before 1500 CE are from Neanderthals. And there are numerous smaller “introgressions” from other populations in the Old World.
Perhaps the question is what the evolutionary tree was before the separation of Neanderthals and the lineage of H. sapiens. That is at least 300,000 years ago and much less is known about it. But the bulk of Homo species seem to have been in Africa for the last million years, often with several coexisting at any one time. (That expansion of H. Sapiens out of Africa seems to have eliminated the other Homo species in Africa as well.) So it’s unlikely that a major step in Homo sapiens’ evolution happened in central Asia.
Thanks Dale. I was just quoting from a major article in the New Scientist magazine (the British equivalent of Scientific American), giving words from what appeared to me to be notable figures in the field. One speaker was backed up by a what sounded like a major peer-reviewed paper on the relevant genetics. But of course I understand that there is likely a vigorous debate among specialists about the matter, made more difficult by the paucity of human remains. Also, this magazine does tend to slant things quite often, so I’m aware they their articles are not quite to be taken at face value. Yet it’ll be interesting to see the responses in the letter’s page in the next or subsequent issue of New Scientist. Quite possibly these will try to re-assert “Out of Africa”, I would expect.
Also, Lovecraft was the late 1920s / early 1930s and he died in 1937. So he had a very pre-1950s view of such things. He also tended to hold to the British view in various scientific debates.
No letters about the article, in this week’s New Scientist magazine. Maybe next week?