Humans did not emerge from a single region of Africa, suggests a powerful modelling study. Rather, our ancestors moved and intermingled for millennia.
The widely held idea that modern-day humans originated from a single region of Africa is being challenged. Models using a vast amount of genomic data suggest that humans arose from multiple ancestral populations around the continent. These ancient populations — which lived more than one million years ago — would have all been the same hominin species but genetically slightly different.
The models supporting this theory rely on new software and genomic-sequencing data from current African and Eurasian populations, as well as Neanderthal remains. Researchers published the results on 17 May in Nature1.
The study contributes more evidence to the idea that there is “no single birthplace in Africa, and that human evolution is a process with very deep African roots”, says Eleanor Scerri, an evolutionary archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany.
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