THE textbook version of how humans evolved in Africa and then travelled out to the rest of the world may have to be torn up. Humans may not after all have had to become highly intelligent, with big brains, to migrate out of Africa.
A surprising new fossil discovery of a small, lightly built species of early human in Central Asia suggests that it wasn’t only large-brained hominids that had the guile to leave Africa. The individual, found in Dmanisi, Georgia, has a much smaller skull than two others found earlier at the same site.
The skeleton, comprising a skull…
