The previous article mentions the Blombos Cave in South Africa, as well as the preponderance of archaeological evidence for early 'modern behaviour' in Upper Palaeolithic Europe. The two might be connected:
"The
Hofmeyr Skull is a
specimen of a 36,000 year old
human skull that was found in 1952 near
Hofmeyr,
South Africa. It is one of a very few
anatomically modern human skulls that have been discovered on the continent which have been dated to over 20,000 years old. [...] Osteological analysis of the cranium by the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology indicates that the specimen is morphologically distinct from recent groups in Subequatorial Africa, including the local
Khoisan populations. The Hofmeyr fossil instead has a very close affinity with other
Upper Paleolithic skulls from Eurasia. Some scientists have interpreted this relationship as being consistent with the
Out-of-Africa theory, which hypothesizes that at least some Upper Paleolithic human groups in Africa and Eurasia should morphologically resemble each other.
[5] "
en.wikipedia.org
"In order to establish the affinities of the Hofmeyr fossil, team member Katerina Harvati of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, used 3-dimensional measurements of the skull known to differentiate recent human populations according to their geographic distributions and genetic relationships. She compared the Hofmeyr skull with contemporaneous Upper Paleolithic skulls from Europe and with the skulls of living humans from Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa, including the Khoe-San (Bushmen). Because the Khoe-San are represented in the recent archeological record of South Africa, they were expected to have close resemblances to the South African fossil. Instead, the Hofmeyr skull is quite distinct from recent sub-Saharan Africans, including the Khoe-San, and has a very close affinity with the European Upper Paleolithic specimens. The surprising similarity between a fossil skull from the southernmost tip of Africa and similarly ancient skulls from Europe is in agreement with the genetics-based "Out of Africa" theory, which predicts that humans like those that inhabited Eurasia in the Upper Paleolithic should be found in sub-Saharan Africa around 36,000 years ago. The skull from South Africa provides the first fossil evidence in support of this prediction."
Dating of skull delivers the first fossil indicator that modern humans evolved in Africa
www.mpg.de
So the ancestors of Palaeolithic Europeans might have come from South Africa. Or alternatively people like Palaeolithic Europeans might have migrated to South Africa. Interestingly the climates in South Africa and Europe are reasonably similar, which is why Europeans settled there in large numbers in the modern era, unlike in other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Also the South African Khoisan people have a light brown skin tone which is closer to that of European and other Eurasian peoples than the dark skin tone of Equatorial Africans, suggesting a similar evolutionary adaptation.
