The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
WHERE DID HOMO SAPIENS GO AFTER AFRICA? NEW STUDY HAS AN ANSWER
OUR SPECIES emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, with a migration out of the continent 60,000 to 70,000 years ago heralding the start of the global spread of Homo sapiens. But where did these pioneers go after leaving Africa?
What did the study find?
According to a new study, 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.
The study has found that this region would have represented an ideal habitat. The researchers called the 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 colonisation 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.
These people lived in small, mobile bands of hunter-gatherers, the researchers said. The hub location offered a variety of ecological settings, from forests to grasslands and savannahs, fluctuating over time between arid and wet intervals.
There would have been ample resources available, with evidence showing thehuntingofwildgazelle,sheepandgoat, according to Anthropologist and study coauthor Michael Petraglia, director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University, Australia.
“Theirdietwouldhavebeencomposed of edible plants and small- to large-sized game. Hunter-gatherer groups seemed to have practised a seasonal lifestyle, living in the lowlands in the cooler months and in the mountainous regions in the warmer months," Petraglia said.
The people inhabiting the hub at the time apparently had dark skin and dark hair, perhaps resembling the Gumuz or Anuak people now living in parts of East Africa, Pagani said.
“Cave art simultaneously appeared as soon as people left the hub. So these cultural achievements might have been brewed while in the hub,” Pagani said.
Their eventual dispersal in different directions beyond the hub set the basis for the genetic divergence between present-day East Asians and Europeans.
How was the study carried out?
The study tapped into modern and ancient genomic data for European and Asian people.
"We found particularly useful the oldest genomes, dating from 45,000 to 35,000 years ago," said molecular anthropologist and study lead author Leonardo Vallini of the University of Padova and the University of Mainz in Germany.