Were The First Civilizations African?

Foofie, your personal defination of civiliztions seem somewhat different that the defination the rest of us use.

Foofie, I think it matters to know where the first civilizations started, as it may give us a better understanding of the evolution of mankind, before and after. The thing is we might have had different first civilizations at different places on the planet at the same time, for example in America, Asia, Africa, etc., only we may not have discovered evidence of that yet.

According to the Toba catastrophe theory, 70,000 to 75,000 years ago, a super volcanic event at Lake Toba reduced the human population to 10,000 or even 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution. The theory was proposed by Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[1][2]


History

Within the last three to five million years, after human and other ape lineages diverged from the hominid stem-line, the human line produced a variety of species.

According to the Toba catastrophe theory, a massive volcanic eruption severely reduced the human population. This may have occurred around 70-75,000 years ago when the Toba caldera in Indonesia underwent an eruption of category 8 (or "mega-colossal") on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. This released energy equivalent to about one gigaton of TNT, which is three thousand times greater than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. According to Ambrose, this reduced the average global temperature by 5 degrees Celsius for several years and may have triggered an ice age.

Ambrose postulates that this massive environmental change created population bottlenecks in the various species that existed at the time; this in turn accelerated differentiation of the isolated human populations, eventually leading to the extinction of all the other human species except for the two branches that became Neanderthals and modern humans.

[edit] Evidence

Some geological evidence and computed models support the plausibility of the Toba catastrophe theory, and genetic evidence suggests that all humans alive today, despite their apparent variety, are descended from a very small population, perhaps between 1,000 and 10,000 individuals.[3][4]

Using the average rates of genetic mutation, some geneticists have estimated that this population lived at a time coinciding with the Toba event. These estimates do not contradict the consensus estimates that Y-chromosomal Adam lived some 60,000 years ago, and that Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived 140,000 years ago, since Toba is not conjectured to be an extremal bottleneck event, where the population was reduced to one breeding pair.

Gene analysis of some genes shows divergence anywhere from 2 million to 60,000 years ago, but this does not contradict the Toba theory, again since Toba is not conjectured to be an extremal bottleneck event. The complete picture of gene lineages (including present-day levels of human genetic variation) supports the theory of a Toba-induced human population bottleneck.[5]

[edit] Migration

According to this theory, humans once again fanned out from Africa after Toba when the climate and other factors permitted. They migrated first to Arabia and India and onwards to Indochina and Australia, and later to the Fertile Crescent and the Middle East.

The recent discovery of 7000+ year old Scandinavians, the carbon dating of several North American finds, and the ancient deep african tribes has thrown several spins into yarns and vice-versa.

Still the fertile crescent of northern Iraq to Jordan and Israel is the only true offer of civilized, true language developed peoples with archeological evidence backing up the theories.

There is much chance in dating ancient bones. But, the pottery, weapons and tools, and sites uncovered in Sumerian lands still offer the best evidence.

It is also evident that middle Africa had some humanoid life long before them, there just isn't much evidence connecting it to modern man.

Geneticists long have argued that the human species passed through a recent bottleneck, but they never offered explanations for the population crash or recovery, nor considered its consequences for modern human diversification. Ambrose's model, which he calls the Weak Garden of Eden/Volcanic Winter model, is an offshoot - with significant additions - of the Weak GOE model proposed by Henry Harpending and others. The Weak GOE model proposes an African origin for modern humans about 130,000 years ago, and credits the invention and spread of advanced stone tool technology, 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, for population growth after the bottleneck. Ambrose argues that volcanic winter resulting from the super-eruption of Toba "caused the bottleneck, and that populations may have expanded in response to climatic warming 10,000 years before the advent of modern technology."

Ambrose has linked geneticists' research to that of volcanologists Michael Rampino, Stephen Self, Greg Zielinski and colleagues, which shows the super-eruption of Toba caused a volcanic winter that lasted six years and significantly altered global climate for the next 1,000 years. Those six years of "relentless volcanic winter" led to substantial lowering of global temperatures, drought and famine, and to a global human population crash during which, if geneticists are correct, no more than 15,000 to 40,000 people survived.

"The standard view of human evolution has been that modern populations evolved from an ancient African ancestor. We assumed that they differentiated gradually because we assumed ancestral populations were large and stable," Ambrose said. But, he noted, genetic research now demonstrates that changes in population size were sometimes dramatic. The new model resolves the paradox of the recent African origin model: If we are all so recently "out of Africa," why don't we all look like Africans?

"When our African recent ancestors passed through the prism of Toba's volcanic winter, a rainbow of differences appeared," Ambrose said.