Where did Homo sapiens go after leaving Africa? – 03/26/2024 – Science

Our species emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago and migrated out of the continent 60,000 or 70,000 years ago, inaugurating the global spread of Homo sapiens. But where did these pioneers go when they left Africa?

After years of debate, a new study offers an answer.

These bands of hunter-gatherers appear to have remained for thousands of years as a homogeneous population in a geographic pole that encompassed Iran, southeastern Iraq and northeastern Saudi Arabia, before settling throughout Asia and Europe, the starting approximately 45 thousand years ago, scientists said this Monday (25).

The findings are based on genomic datasets extracted from ancient DNA and a collection of modern genes, combined with paleoecological evidence showing that this region represented an ideal habitat.

Researchers call this region — part of what is known as the Persian Plateau — a “hub” for these people, perhaps just thousands, before they moved on, millennia later, to more distant locations.

“Our results show the first complete picture of the whereabouts of the ancestors of all modern-day non-Africans in the early phases of Eurasian colonization,” said molecular anthropologist Luca Pagani of the University of Padova in Italy, senior author of the published study. in the journal Nature Communications.

Anthropologist and study co-author Michael Petraglia, director of the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University, said the work is a story about us and our history. “Our goal was to unravel some of the mysteries about our evolution and worldwide dispersal,” he said.

These people lived in small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, according to the researchers. The pole’s location offered a variety of ecological environments, from forests to grasslands and savannas, fluctuating over time between arid and humid intervals.

The hypothesis is that there were many resources available, and there is evidence of hunting of wild gazelles, sheep and goats, according to Petraglia.

“Their diet would have been composed of edible plants and small to large game. Hunter-gatherer groups appear to have practiced a seasonal lifestyle, living in the lowlands in the colder months and in mountainous regions in the warmer months,” Petraglia said.

The people who inhabited the pole at the time apparently had dark skin and hair, perhaps similar to the Gumuz or Anuak people who live in areas of East Africa today, Pagani said.

“Rock art emerged simultaneously, as soon as people left the center. Therefore, these cultural achievements may have been created while they were at the center,” said Pagani.

The eventual dispersal in different directions beyond the pole laid the basis for genetic divergence between present-day East Asians and Europeans, the researchers said.

The study explored modern and ancient genomic data from European and Asian peoples.

“We found the oldest genomes, dating from 45,000 to 35,000 years ago, particularly useful,” said molecular anthropologist and lead author of the study, Leonardo Vallini, from the University of Padova and the University of Mainz in Germany.

Researchers have devised a way to unravel the extensive genetic mixing of populations that has occurred since the poleward dispersal.

There have been previous small-scale tours of the Homo sapiens out of Africa before the main migration 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, but they seem to have resulted in dead ends.

O Homo sapiens it was not the first human species to live outside Africa, including the area that encompasses the pole. Ancient interbreeding left a small Neanderthal contribution to the DNA of modern non-Africans.

“Neanderthals were present in the area before the arrival of Homo sapienstherefore, the pole may well have been the location of this interaction”, said Vallini.