Also, don’t forget that there is no evidence Modern Humans are descendants of any of the early fossil primates, nor has even one transition fossil been discovered that Modern Humans ‘evolved’ from these early primates…

Al

“many of the these species tended to favour open grasslands, which might imply climate change”

Anything to avoid blaming humans. After all, that’s something that’s only happened with European spread. Anyway, no matter how ‘densely vegetated’ the habitats became there would still have been ‘ open landscape’ somewhere.

“You’ll recall that the arrow or dart may have been invented in Africa some 60,000 years ago”

Well. There we have it. Y-hap pre-A. As the technology spread so did his descendants.

During some related correspondence, he stated the following:

“The fossil record of southernmost Africa documents the disappearance of a giant buffalo, a giant zebra, a giant hartebeest, a sort of mountain goat, and a species of springbok at ~10,000 years ago”

And going back further, into the Late Pleistocene, “(at) ~100-30 ka sediments in Kenya … the presence of an extinct blesbok, extinct giant hartebeest, extinct giant buffalo, and what is possibly a new species of extinct giant sable antelope (although we have only one tooth). Problem is, most people don’t focus on this time period in East Africa. ”

He further notes that (in common with say, North America and Australia) many of the these species tended to favour open grasslands, which might imply climate change, as more densely vegetated habitats replace the open landscape.

Because the African extinctions were less severe, it has further been suggested the human predators may have been to blame, but maybe there were less casualties as humans and fauna had co-evolved over a longer period of time there.

You’ll recall that the arrow or dart may have been invented in Africa some 60,000 years ago, if the artefacts at Sibudu Cave (d’Errico et al 2007 – doi:10.1016/j.jas.2007.11.006 ), are anything to go by, though I’m not sure to what extent projectile weaponry prevailed through the rest of the MSA from then on, whether it spread from Africa through diffusion only, or was independently invented at different loci on an unknown number of occasions.

I’m hoping to hear from Tyler Faith in the future when he has more information regarding African extinctions, at which time I’ll cover them here.

Do you have any information on that? I remeber arguing with someone who claimed there was no evidence for African extinctions. I haven’t been able to find any information on the Internet concerning African extinctions but a 1971 book by Bjorn Kurten (“The Age of Mammals”) claimed almost 40% of the different genera of large animals in Africa had become extinct by 60,000 years ago, and most were extinct long before then. Coincides quite closely with most ages given for Y-chromosome Adam, which would support many of the points suggested in this post regarding modern humans and Neanderthals.