Ancient jawbone suggests cradle of humanity was in Europe ( video )
 

Here is a documentary about this new discovery, the dig, and the multiple hypothesis they have, one of which is that mankind began in Europe. The doco really well done :thumbsup

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Ancient jawbone suggests cradle of humanity was in Europe

A wonky jawbone may have recast the first chapter of mankind?s history by way of a journey involving a Nazi geologist, the first queen consort of Greece and a lump of resin in the Natural History Museum.

In 1944, as the Germans prepared to abandon Athens, one of their men found a small fossil in a bunker dug into the grounds of the Queen?s Tower, a faux-gothic keep built by King Otto for his glamorous wife.

More than seven decades later, the lower mandible has resurfaced as evidence that the cradle of humanity may lie not in Africa but in Europe. A team of palaeontologists says that the jaw may be the oldest known specimen of a distinctly human ancestor, although not everyone is convinced.

The "out of Africa" theory has too many holes in it for the science industry to continue pushing it as absolute fact.

In the end, the Ahnenerbe's and the Nazis' attempts to prove their ethnic superiority via archaeological digs proved fruitless and amounted to nothing more than propaganda.

Aside from helping to fuel his massive propaganda machine, Hitler also used archaeology to make his case that Germany had every right to invade surrounding countries. After the invasion of Poland in 1940, Hitler sent a group of archaeologists to try to prove that the Germans had lived there first and had legitimate claim to the land. But the quest to prove Germany's superiority didn't start with World War II; it started quite a few years earlier.