A new fossil ape from an 8.7-million-year-old site in Türkiye is challenging long-accepted ideas of human origins and adding weight to the theory that the ancestors of African apes and humans evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa between nine and seven million years ago.
True, but how do we even know this is our ancestor and not the ancestor of, for example, neanderthals? How do we know that this line of hominids “returned to Africa” at all?
I don’t think we do know that. I understand this article to say “here is the only evidence we have, and if it’s the only evidence we ever get, we believe it to mean x”