Old Hickory wrote:
I attended a presentation by IBM where they offered compelling data detailing the confirmation of how humans migrated from Africa to all parts of the Earth. It was science backed by the greatest computational company in the history of the world. I was assured, then, that the science was settled. Oh well.
The Genographic Project. Here's a link to the project:
https://www-03.ibm.com/...essrelease/35877.wss[/url]
Or here:
https://www.ibm.com/...global_research.htmlYou're confusing two separate issues. These fossils from Greece are speaking to where the lineage that broke off from apes originated, referred to as either hominins or hominids, i.e. the evolutionary lineage that eventually lead to us. I don't think this find is going to upset the apple cart too much, it just suggests that maybe it could have happened in Europe and not Africa, but there aren't a whole lot of ape fossils from that time in Africa either, so maybe. What can be said is that a couple to a few millions of years later when there is a decent fossil record all the primitive hominids to date have been found in Africa. So if it turns out they did originate in southern Europe they must have migrated to Africa at some point relatively early on.
The genetic studies you refer to above are speaking to out of that hominid lineage where did the modern human species evolve. Seems like several different lines of evidence have been pointing to Africa for some time now. This population then migrated out of Africa and swamped the hominid populations that were already there (i.e. Neandertals, Denisovians, there appears to have been another genetically identifiable population in Southeast Asia), such that everyone today is mostly descended from that African population with a few % of your genes coming from Neandertals or Denisovians, etc. if you're not African.
IOW, these fossils are about what was going on roughly 5 to 7 millions years ago, the genetic data is about what was going on in the last few hundred thousand years.