Anatomically modern human in the context of "Paleoanthropology"

The Middle Paleolithic (or Middle Palaeolithic) is the second subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age as it is understood in Europe, Africa and Asia. The term Middle Stone Age is used as an equivalent or a synonym for the Middle Paleolithic in African archeology. The Middle Paleolithic broadly spanned from 300,000 to 50,000 years ago. There are considerable dating differences between regions. The Middle Paleolithic was succeeded by the Upper Paleolithic subdivision which first began between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago. Pettit and White date the Early Middle Paleolithic in Great Britain to about 325,000 to 180,000 years ago (late Marine Isotope Stage 9 to late Marine Isotope Stage 7), and the Late Middle Paleolithic as about 60,000 to 35,000 years ago. The Middle Paleolithic was in the geological Chibanian (Middle Pleistocene) and Late Pleistocene ages.

According to the theory of the recent African origin of modern humans, anatomically modern humans began migrating out of Africa during the Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic around 125,000 years ago and began to replace other Homo species such as the Neanderthals and Homo erectus.

Early human migrations are the earliest migrations and expansions of archaic and modern humans across continents. They are believed to have begun approximately 2 million years ago with the early expansions out of Africa by Homo erectus. This initial migration was followed by other archaic humans including H. heidelbergensis, which lived around 500,000 years ago and was the likely ancestor of Denisovans and Neanderthals as well as modern humans. Early hominids had likely crossed land bridges that have now sunk.

Within Africa, Homo sapiens dispersed around the time of its speciation, roughly 300,000 years ago. The recent African origin theory suggests that the anatomically modern humans outside of Africa descend from a population of Homo sapiens migrating from East Africa roughly 70–50,000 years ago and spreading along the southern coast of Asia and to Oceania by about 50,000 years ago. Modern humans spread across Europe about 40,000 years ago.

The African Pygmies (or Congo Pygmies, variously also Central African foragers, African rainforest hunter-gatherers (RHG) or Forest People of Central Africa) are a group of ethnicities native to Central Africa, mostly the Congo Basin, traditionally subsisting on a forager and hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They are divided into three roughly geographic groups:

• The western Bambenga, or Mbenga (Cameroon, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic),
• the eastern Bambuti, or Mbuti, of the Congo basin (DRC)
• the central and southern Batwa, or Twa (Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Angola and Namibia). The more widely scattered (and more variable in physiology and lifestyle) Southern Twa are also grouped under the term Pygmoid.

They are notable for, and named for, their short stature (described as "pygmyism" in anthropological literature). They are assumed to be descended from the original Middle Stone Age expansion of anatomically modern humans to Central Africa, albeit substantially affected by later migrations from West Africa, from their first appearance in the historical record in the 19th century limited to a comparatively small area within Central Africa, greatly decimated by the prehistoric Bantu expansion, and to the present time widely affected by enslavement at the hands of neighboring Bantu, Ubangian and Central Sudanic groups.

Homo sapiens is a distinct species of the hominid family of primates, which also includes all the great apes. Over their evolutionary history, humans gradually developed traits such as bipedalism, dexterity, and complex language, as well as interbreeding with other hominins (a tribe of the African hominid subfamily), indicating that human evolution was not linear but weblike. The study of the origins of humans involves several scientific disciplines, including physical and evolutionary anthropology, paleontology, and genetics; the field is also known by the terms anthropogeny, anthropogenesis, and anthropogony—with the latter two sometimes used to refer to the related subject of hominization.

Primates diverged from other mammals about 85 million years ago (mya), in the Late Cretaceous period, with their earliest fossils appearing over 55 mya, during the Paleocene. Primates produced successive clades leading to the ape superfamily, which gave rise to the hominid and the gibbon families; these diverged some 15–20 mya. African and Asian hominids (including orangutans) diverged about 14 mya. Hominins (including the Australopithecine and Panina subtribes) parted from the Gorillini tribe between 8 and 9 mya; Australopithecine (including the extinct biped ancestors of humans) separated from the Pan genus (containing chimpanzees and bonobos) 4–7 mya. The Homo genus is evidenced by the appearance of H. habilis over 2 mya, while anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago.

Qafzeh Cave (Hebrew: מערת קפזה, Arabic: كهف القفزة), or Kedumim Cave (Hebrew: מערת קדומים, lit. 'Cave of the Ancients'), is a prehistoric archaeological site located at the bottom of Mount Precipice in the Jezreel Valley of Lower Galilee south of Nazareth, Israel. Important remains of prehistoric people were discovered on the site - some of the oldest examples in the world, outside of Africa, of virtually anatomically modern human beings. These were discovered on the ledge just outside the cave, where 18 layers from the Middle Paleolithic era were identified. The interior of the cave contains layers ranging from the Neolithic era to the Bronze Age.

The concept of race as a categorization of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) has an extensive history in Europe and the Americas. The contemporary word race itself is modern; historically it was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries. Race acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology through scientific racism starting in the 19th century. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. The American Anthropological Association's 1998 "Statement on Race" outlined race as a social construct, not biological reality. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."

Herto Man refers to human remains (Homo sapiens) discovered in 1997 from the Upper Herto member of the Bouri Formation in the Afar Triangle, Ethiopia. The remains have been dated as between 154,000 and 160,000 years old. The discovery of Herto Man was especially significant at the time, falling within a long gap in the fossil record between 300 and 100 thousand years ago and representing the oldest dated H. sapiens remains then described.

In the original description paper, these 12 (at minimum) individuals were described as falling just outside the umbrella of "anatomically modern human". Thus, Herto Man was classified into a new subspecies as "Homo sapiens idaltu" (Afar: Idaltu "elder"). It supposedly represented a transitional morph between the more archaic H. (s.?) rhodesiensis and H. s. sapiens (that is, a stage in a chronospecies). Subsequent researchers have rejected this classification. The validity of such subspecies is difficult to justify because of the vague definitions of "species" and "subspecies", especially when discussing a chronospecies, as the exact end-morphology and start-morphology of the ancestor and descendant species are inherently unresolvable.

Haua Fteah (Arabic: هوا فطيح, romanized: Hawā Fṭiyaḥ) is a large karstic cave located in the Cyrenaica in northeastern Libya. This site has been of significance to research on African archaeological history and anatomically modern human prehistory because it was occupied during the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, the Mesolithic and the Neolithic. Evidence of modern human presence in the cave date back to 200,000 BP.

The term 'haua' describes a typical cave structure of the local coastal area, which has been formed in its present shape by erosion processes of the sea during the early stage of the Pleistocene.