Scientists: Veritable Garden of Eden Helped Humans Survive Ice Age
Humans may have been able to survive the Ice Age by seeking refuge in caves along the coast of South Africa.
The isolated region, roughly 240 miles east of Cape Town, would have helped a small group of humans last through a catastrophic temperature change which devastated the ranks most mammal populations about 195,000 years ago.
Professor Curtis Marean of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University said that the handful of survivors were likely progenitors of the human race.
Though intriguing, the hypothesis has not convinced all scientists. Professor Chris Stringer, a human origins expert at the Natural History Museum in London, told the Daily Mail that he was skeptical about the claim humanity descended from a single band of survivors in Africa.
"We know, for example, that there were early modern humans in Ethiopia 160,000 years ago and others in Morocco, and populations like those may also have contributed to our ancestry," Stringer told the paper.
You can learn more about the African evidence for the origins of modern human behavior by clicking on this video of a lecture Marean delivered a couple of years ago:)