The earliest diffusion of the genus Homo toward Asia and Europe: a brief overview.

During the last decade a growing amount of evidence has focused the attention of paleoanthropologists on the earliest diffusion of the genus Homo into Eurasia. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most probable area where our ancestry emerged: the problem is ‘when’ ‘why’, and which hominid/s diffused into the rest of the continent as well as toward Asia and Europe. New sites at the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary and re-dating of known localities (particularly in Asia), together with new fossil evidence and reappraisal of former discoveries (everywhere in Eurasia) call for a global reconsideration of the entire issue. This should involve not only dating techniques, paleoenvironmental analyses, and skeletal morphology, but also the extant paradigms regarding biology, taxonomy, phylogeny, behaviour, and adaptive strategies of our genus.