题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：普通
河南省南阳市2019-2020学年高二下学期英语期末考试试卷
Until now, the oldest evidence of human ancestors outside of Africa was in Dmanisi, Georgia. Here fossils of short people thought to be early Homo erectus date back to about 1.85 million years—just after the species appears in Africa. The oldest evidence of early human activity in China can date back to 1.5 million to 1.7 million years ago, which has suggested that they didn't leave Africa until 2 million years ago or so—and made it to eastern Asia even later.
Now evidence from the site of Shangchen in the Loess Plateau approximately 1,200 kilometers southwest of Beijing is shaking up that view. More than 2 million years ago, our ancestors were already world travelers, which shows that the ancestors of modern humans left Africa at least 250,000 years earlier than thought. It also supports a minority view that a key human ancestors, Homo erectus, may have originated in Asia, not in Africa.
The same team, led by geologist Zhao Yuzhu of the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry at the Chinese Academy of Science found that the stone tools range in age from 1.6 million to 2.1 millions years ago. This indicates humans—the family that includes humans and our ancestors—got out of Africa at least a quarter of a million years earlier than thought, and occupied Shangchen on and off for more than 850,000 years, the team reports today in Nature.
"The dates are convincing," Zhao Yuezhu says, which suggest humans were already remarkably adaptable to the changeable climate by 2.1 millions ago—even though they had not yet developed the even bigger brains, long legs, or more advanced tools seen in later humans. Although the identity of these early travelers all over the world is unknown, the new dates raise the possibility that H. Erects weren't the first humans to leave Africa.
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