A group of students at Texas State University reportedly stormed out of an anthropology class Wednesday, after their lecturer, Dr. R. Jon McGee, said the entire human race originated from Africa, reports The Tab.
Dr. McGee reportedly informed the students that he was going to talk about race so it was important that they all paid attention.
The professor began his lecture with the Black Lives Matter Movement and its inception before announcing that every living being is a descendant of East Africa.
“It was dead silent before a student retorted with a sarcastic ‘sure,'” 20-year-old Justine Lundy said.
Lundy added that it was the mention of Black Lives Matter that prompted some students to walk out, with one student tweeting:
My Professor just said all living ppl are descendants from Africa and ppl got up and walked out and now their arguing ??? pic.twitter.com/TNj6EDmybv
— Aj (@amvrion) October 18, 2016
Those who didn’t leave were reportedly left arguing. Still, Dr. McGee insists that the discussion went well with the majority of the students.
“As a whole, I think the group is open-minded,” Dr. McGee says. “Understanding other peoples’ perspectives is a basic part of cultural anthropology.”
Simmering Racial Tensions
While the old-style racial discrimination in the United States of America may have been done away with, the ongoing protests by African Americans over the continued killing of Black men by White police officers is a stark reminder that the so-called “free world” is not out of the woods yet.
At least 35 percent of Americans say they are seriously worried about the simmering racial tensions in the country, according to Gallup.
The ongoing deaths of unarmed Black men at the hands of White police officers have sparked major, and at times, violent protests, triggering the nationwide movement of Black Lives Matter.
Out of Africa
Dr. McGee’s argument that humans originated from Africa is not new and a widely accepted by scientists; for example, in 2007, a group of scientists from the University of Cambridge contended that after looking at more than 6,000 skulls from more than 100 ancient populations, the evidence once again points to the African origin of the human race, with National Geographic writing at the time of the report, “We [humans] are solely children of Africa—with no Neandertals or island-dwelling ‘hobbits’ in our family tree.”
It has been widely argued that there were two migrations: an early one through northern Africa and a second one through the southern route.
Historians claim that the first migration happened between 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, with this group of migrants either dying or retreating.
The first group is thought to have been replaced by the second group, which supposedly lived between 69,000 to 77,000 years ago.
And while some Chinese historians dispute this theory — claiming that modern humans already existed in China 80,000 years ago — Professor Jin Li of Shanghai Fudan University debunked that particular theory in 2009 due to the genetic evidence he found showing that modern Chinese also originated in Africa.
Watch a video of his findings here:
