3 Also, for that matter, prior to the intra-Africa migration from (North) East
Africa, which is not explored in this chapter.
4 I do not deny that so-called convergence would be one possibility. However, it
would be extremely diffi cult (in fact, almost impossible) to discover suffi cient
niche conditions that caused one particular abstract common linguistic property
to emerge in every place in the world.
5 For some recent general remarks on “Out-of-Africa,” see Klein (2009) and Tat-
tersall (2009).
6 See Adler et al. (2014) for the presence of Levallois technology in the Southern
Caucasus and the possibility of a different interpretation.
7 However, see the critiques by Kaifu and Fujita (2012) and Kaifu (2013), and
Curnoe et al. (2012).
8 See also Liu et al. (2010a).
9 Furthermore, according to Shen et al. (2002), the Liujiang (southern China)
well-preserved fossils of Homo sapiens are dated by U-series dating to at least
68 kya, but more likely to 111–139 kya (or older than 153 kya). The same logic
can also apply here. See also L iu et al. (2013) and X iao et al. (2014) for some
unclear cases of hominin fossils.
10 According to Wang et al. (2014), Middle Pleistocene bifaces from the Fengshu-
dao site located in the Bose Basin, Guangxi, southern China, are around 803
kya. They indicate that “although Fengshudao may be a case of western Acheulean
hominins dispersing into the Bose Basin from nearby South Asia, it is quite
possible that the Fengshudao bifaces may be considered an example of convergent
evolution.” That is, it is fairly certain that they are not the stone tools directly
associated with those originally from East Africa.
11 Hominin fossils found in early twentieth century in Qafseh and Skhul caves in
the Levant, Israel, Middle East, are viewed as evidence which shows that Homo
sapiens was there 92–115/119 kya (S hea (2003, 2 008)). Humans were consid-
ered to have migrated out of Africa through the northern route via the Nile
valley. In this chapter, I essentially follow S hea (2008) and T attersall (2009),
accepting the hypothesis that humans could not reach other areas because they
became extinct 75 kya because of the advent of the Ice Age. Note that the
timing of this dispersal is not incompatible with the hypothesis of an earlier
human UG emergence. However, if we consider the human bones found in
Misliya Cave, Israel, which are believed to be 150,000 years old (B rahic (2014)),
the timing of the emergence of human UG may need to be slightly modifi ed.
See note 16.
12 The concept of a molecular clock is “[T]he idea that nucleotide substitutions
accumulate at a constant rate over time and that this rate can therefore be used
to estimate divergence times between sequences” ( Scally and Durbin (2012: 752)).
13 Recently, Fu et al. (2013) have proposed a rate of 2.67×10−8 substitutions per
site per year for the whole molecule, which is higher than that proposed by
S cally and Durbin (2012) and is “approximately 1.6 fold higher than the fossil-
calibrated rate.. .” (F u et al. (2013: 556)). Furthermore, the authors note that
the calculation based on this rate implies that Out-of-Africa occurred less than
62.4–94.9 kya (p. 556). A tentative solution for this inconsistency that I could
suggest at this point is that Sc ally and Durbin (2012) used the nuclear genome
with a lower mutation rate, while Fu et al. (2013) used ancient mitochondrial
DNA, which is not a typical genome, in their investigation (Gi bbons (2013)).
14 However, see Fagundes et al. (2007). Based on a Bayesian analysis of the genomic
data under a simple African replacement model with exponential population
growth, these authors suggest that “[T]he Out-of-Africa migration, initially
involving only ≈450 effective individuals would have occurred some 51 Kya,.. .”
(p. 17615). See also M ellars et al. (2013).
194 Masayuki Ike-uchi