Asian origin of modern humans

The Asia hypothesis also known as the out of Asia theory, is an obsolete scientific theory which contended that modern humans first arose in Asia.
Up until the mid 20th century Asia was preferred by most scientists over Africa, as the continent where the first hominids evolved.
Origins
In the late 18th century up until the early 20th century the Asia hypothesis was a popular hypothesis amongst a wide range of scientific thinkers in Europe. European scholars regarded Asia as the cradle of mankind from which emerged all the peoples who later populate Europe and Africa.
The discussion for human origins located in Asia began in the 17th century. During the enlightment period a number of European geographers and philosophers believed that high mountain regions would be the ideal locality of the first humans so suggested the Himalayas of Tibet as the cradle of mankind where the first humans had originated. Voltaire and Immanuel Kant both argued that the first humans had developed in Tibet, the French philosopher Denis Diderot also claimed the oldest science in the world could be traced back to Asia, so the first humans must have developed in that region.
The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his book Histoire Naturelle argued that mans birthplace must be in a high temperate zone as he believed good climate conditions would breed healthy humans, he theorized that the most logical place to look for the first humans existence would be in Asia and around the Caspian Sea region. In Germany Johann Blumenbach also supported the Asiatic origins of humankind.
Christoph Meiners, a German historian and polygenist claimed that different races had their origin from different sides of the Caucasus mountains in Asia. According to Meiners:
"Almost all of the sagas and tales of ancient nations indicate that the human race originated in the Caucasus mountain range and the plains to the south of it. From here, the humans spread to all the ends of the world."
The German archeologist Georg Friedrich Creuzer in his 1805 work Symbolism and mythology of ancient peoples claimed that the first human religions in the world had developed in Asia where the first humans had originated from. Joseph Görres also supported similar conclusions but went further and claimed the first humans had developed in the ganges of Northern India.
In the 19th Century European explorers claimed that the original inhabitants of Africa and other countries such as America were migrants originally from Asia.
The English Ethnographer George William Stow (1822 - 1882) who moved to South Africa to study rock paintings, thought that the oldest inhabitants of Africa the San had come from Asia, in two migratory waves, the first consisting of rock painters and the second of rock engravers, Stow believed they had crossed the Red Sea, by the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and ended up at the southern tip of Africa.
The German zoologist and explorer Franz Stuhlmann also concluded that all of the inhabitants including the San and the Pygmies in Africa had once had an Asiatic origin. Many anthropologists in this era such as Lewis H. Morgan concluded that the indigenous peoples of the Americas had migrated from Asia in ancient times. Morgan also believed that every race on earth could be traced back to Asia.
Influenced by German thinking, English writers took up Asia as the cradle of humankind in the 19th century but extended the theory, starting the migration chain of humans from a homeland in central Asia through Europe, through the forests of Germany and finally to the shores of England.
The British ethnologist James Prichard famous for defending monogenism also defended the Asia hypothesis, he published The Eastern Origins of the Celtic Nations in 1831 in which he linked the Celts to an Asiatic origin. Robert Gordon Latham an English enthnologist also claimed that mankind had originated in “interrtropical Asia”.
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau claimed that all human races could be traced back to a common centre in Asia where “the populations overflowed like a bowl which is too full, and poured themselves out in human waves in all directions”. Some scientists of the 18th and early 19th century linked Asia as the cradle of mankind to the Biblical Garden of Eden; this was seen in the work of the polymath Constantine Samuel Rafinesque.
Benjamin Smith Barton the American physician claimed that many of the human languages on earth could be traced back to an Asiatic origin; he was also a devout Christian, in his book Hints on the etymology of certain English words he wrote:
"The books of Moses inform us, that mankind were created in Asia. Ever since I have busied myself, and I may add, rendered myself happy, with inquires into the languages of the Americans, I have ceased to entertain any doubts of the accuracy of the scripture story, so far as regards the Asiatic origin of men, and their dispersion from a common centre."
The German philosopher Hegel claimed the history of the whole world began in Asia, he claimed that no historical evolution had ever occured in Africa and that all history can be traced back to Asia.
The linguistic basis of the theory developed from the work of the British philologist Sir William Jones who founded the Asiatic Society. Jones published a number of papers claiming that many of the languages around the world can be traced back to Asia. His work lead him to embrace the Asia Hypothesis of human origins. Hegel praised the work of Jones and said it was “the discovery of a new world”.
Other theorists of this era included Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link a German naturalist who positioned the cradle of humankind in Armenia located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe. The French writer Ernest Renan wrote that the first race on earth had been an Aryan race which had originated in Asia.
Jacob Grimm wrote in his book History of the German Language in 1848 wrote:
"All peoples of Europe and, to begin with, those which were originally related and which gained supremacy at the cost of many wanderings and dangers, emigrated from Asia in the remote past”
The Central Asian hypothesis was propounded also by August Wilhelm Schlegel, August Pott, Christian Lassen, Friedrich von Spiegel, Max Muller and many other scholars of Europe.
Asia hypothesis and evolution
Due to the rise of evolutionary thought in the late 19th century the Asia hypothesis gained many new proponents, many of which believed that the missing link was to be found in Asia.
Ernst Haeckel, Eugene Dubois, Henry Fairfield Osborn and Roy Chapman Andrews all considered Asia where the major events of evolution had occurred.
The British author and evolutionist Robert Chambers wrote in his book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation that Asia was the cradle of mankind; Chambers was also a member of the Asiatic Society. Charles Lyell also supported the Asian origins of mankind.
Hugh Falconer the Scottish palaeontologist and geologist addressing the Royal Asiatic Society in 1844 said:
"The human race has been traced further back into time in the past than in any other quarters of the globe; and the tendency of all enquires has been to show that at least a large section of mankind first dawned in the valley of the Ganges."
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) the German evolutionary biologist claimed the origin of humanity was to be found in Asia; he believed that Hindustan (South Asia) was the actual location where the first humans had evolved. Haeckel argued that humans were closely related to the primates of Southeast Asia and rejected Darwin’s hypothesis of Africa.
Haeckel later claimed that the missing link was to be found on the lost continent of Lemuria located in the Indian Ocean, he believed that Lemuria was the home of the first humans and that Asia was the home of many of the earliest primates, he thus supported that Asia was the cradle of hominin evolution. Haeckel also claimed that Lemuria connected Asia and Africa which allowed the migration of humans to the rest of the world.
Eugène Dubois a Dutch paleoanthropologist and proponent of the Asia hypothesis influenced by seeing a lecture by Ernst Haeckel discovered the skeletal remains of the first representative Homo erectus found in Java in 1891 on the banks of solo river, South Asia. The find later became known as Java man.

Because of the find of Peking man, it was considered by anthropologists up until the 1930’s that Asia was most likely the cradle of the human species.
William Boyd Dawkins claimed that the tropical region of Asia was “the probable birthplace of the human race”. The British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon said: “There is reason to believe that mankind did not originate in Africa; but that all the main races in that continent reached it from Southern Asia”
Apart from Eugene Dubois very few of the early human origin theorists actually visited Asia to see if their ideas were valid or not. This changed in the 1920’s as a well funded expedition was carried out in Asia called The Central Asiatic Expedition, the expedition lasted for over a decade to various parts of Asia including China and Mongolia to search for the origins of mankind.
Paleotontologists who believed mans origins to be found in Asia also included Johan Gunnar Andersson, Otto Zdansky and Walter W. Granger. All three of these scientists were known for visiting China and for their work and discoveries by excavating the sites at Zhoukoudian that yielded the Peking man (Homo erectus pekinensis). Further funding for the excavations was carried out by Davidson Black a key proponent of the Asia hypothesis. Becuase of the finds in Zhoukoudian, such as Peking man, the focus of paleoanthropological research moved entirely to Asia, up until 1930.
The explorer Roy Chapman Andrews along with Henry Fairfield Osborn led several expeditions to Asia from 1922 to 1928 known as the “Cental Asiatic Expeditions” setting out to try and find the earliest human remains in Asia, however Andrews and his team found many other finds, such as dinosaurs bones and fossil mammals and most notably the first known dinosaur nests full of eggs. Andrews main account of these expeditions can be found in his book The new conquest of cental Asia.
In Andrews book in 1926 On the Trail of the Ancient Man, Henry Fairfield Osborn noted in the the preface that the birthplace of modern humans would be found in Asia and that he had predicted it decades earlier even before the Asiatic expeditions were carried out.
Another key proponent of the Asia hypothesis of this era was William Diller Matthew he also took part in the Central Asiatic expeditions, Matthew was well known for his deeply influential 1915 article “Climate and evolution”, Matthews theory was that climate change was how organisms came to live where we find them today in opposition to the theory of continental drift. His basic premise was that cyclical changes in global climate along with the prevailing tendancy for mammals to disperse from north to south account for the odd geographic patterns of living mammals, he believed that humans and many other groups of modern mammals first evolved in the northern areas of the globe, especially centra Asia becuase of the shifting climatic circumstances, Matthew firmly placed hominid origins in central Asia as he claimed that the high plateaux of Tibet was the forcing ground of mammalian evolution.
The latest defenders of the Asia Hypothesis included Henry Fairfield Osborn, Davidson Black, and William King Gregory.
Henry Fairfield Osborn was an eccentric and most well known for his hypothesis of the Dawn Man theory of human origins which he claimed would be found in Tibet and Mongolia. Osborn firmly believed that Asia had been the cradle of humankind.
Davidson Black writing a paper in 1925 titled Asia and the dispersal of primates claimed that the origins of man were to be found in Tibet, British India, the Yung-Ling and the Tarim Basin of China, his last paper published in 1934 before his death argued for human origins in an Eastern Asian context. William King Gregory also wrote that the Tarim Desert is the most likely place for human origins.
Von Koenigswald who found the first Gigantopithecus tooth in Hong Kong in 1935, continued to support the Asia hypothesis.
The Asia hypothesis however later fell into decline, one of the reasons was becuase Franz Weidenreich merged the Asia hypothesis into the multiregional origin of modern humans, extending many other regions into his theory from the Old World with gene flow between various populations which influenced many anthropologists of the time.

The last support for the Asia hypothesis was due to the finds of fossils such as the Dryopithecus and Ramapithecus in Eurasia up until the early 1980’s.
One of the last advocates of the Asia hypothesis was Jia Lanpo who argued that the cradle of humanity had been in Southwest China, up until his death in 2001. Scholar Sigrid Schmalzer in her book The People’s Peking man claims the only modern advocates of the Asia hypothesis have their beliefs firmly rooted in Chinese Nationalism.
Decline
The search for hominid origins shifted from Asia, to Africa after the 1940’s.

The discovery of Zinjanthropus boisei and Homo habilis in Africa convinced many paleoanthropologists that Africa was the location where hominids had evolved. One of the other reasons was that the Australopithecines found in Africa were later classified as hominids, (the Asia Hypothesis theorists and many other scientists originally claimed they were apes) however the mainstream view after the work of Le Gros Clark was that they were hominids, after 1959 further fossil specimens were found in Africa while nothing new was reported from Asia in the 1950’s.
Some scientists theorized that the Australopithecines could still had been displaced originally from Central Asia, however this position was rarely theorized, and by 1950 most anthropologists due to the work of Raymond Dart were beginning to theorize the Out of Africa theory.
The Asia hypothesis also fell into decline as the original proponents such as Davidson Black and Henry Fairfield Osborn died before the 1950’s and had no trained successors to continue their work.
Other reasons for the decline included the merging of the Asia hypothesis into the multiregional hypothesis, for example Peking man for the Asia hypothesis was the origin of humanity whilst the more popular view was later held by the Multiregional theorists who claimed that Peking man stood for Chinese origins only.
Futher evidence for hominids found in Africa, were found in 1947, which built confidence for most anthropologists in African origins.
By 1960 the search for the origins of humankind in Asia had mostly stopped and all focus was spent searching in Africa, the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa later became known as “the cradle of mankind”. The Asia hypothesis is now considered as an obsolete scientific theory, replaced by recent scientific models such as the multiregional hypothesis and Out of Africa theory.
Criticism
Sigrid Schmalzer a professor of Chinese history has claimed that the Asia hypothesis has a strong history routed in nationalism and racialism, she further claims that Chinese paleoanthropologists who support the Asia hypothesis have their thinking strongly routed in Chinese nationalism and ethnocentrism, her claims have been supported by other scholars such as Barry Sautman.

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