Where did our ancestors end up after migrating from Africa? New study has some clues
global spread of Homo sapiens. But where did these pioneers go after leaving Africa?
After years of debate, a new study offers an answer. These bands of hunter-gatherers appear to have lingered for thousands of years as a homogeneous population in a geographic hub that spanned Iran, southeast Iraq and northeast Saudi Arabia before going on to settle all of Asia and Europe starting roughly 45,000 years ago, scientists said on Monday.
Their findings were based on genomic datasets drawn from ancient DNA and modern gene pools, combined with paleoecological evidence that showed that this region would have represented an ideal habitat. The researchers called this region, part of what is called the Persian Plateau, a «hub» for these people — who numbered perhaps only in the thousands — before they continued onward millennia later to more distant locales.
«Our results provide the first full picture of the whereabouts of the ancestors of all present-day non-Africans in the early phases on the colonization of Eurasia,» said molecular anthropologist Luca Pagani of the University of Padova in Italy, senior author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
Anthropologist and study co-author Michael Petraglia, director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University, said the study «is a story about us and our history — our goal was to unravel some of the mystery about our evolution and our worldwide dispersal.»
«The combination of genetic and paleoecological models allowed us
