Heredity|Neanderthal genes contain new evidence of multiple waves of homo sapiens migration. All the waves started from Africa.
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
Man spread from Africa to Europe and Asia in many waves.
New evidence of early migrations has been found in the DNA of Neanderthals.
Homo sapiens interbred with its relative Neanderthal perhaps already around 200,000–250,000 years ago.
Our species homo sapiens was born and developed in Africa.
Scientists have long believed that a small group left Africa about 50,000 years ago to populate the rest of the world.
However, as the 21st century progresses, evidence of several earlier migration waves has been found.
Modern humans may have left Africa for the first time around 250,000 years ago.
of Princeton university geneticist Joshua Akey and his groups researched possible migration waves.
The team compared the genomes of 2,000 living humans from around the world to three Neanderthal genomes. Neanderthals had about two to four percent of the ancestry of ancient homo sapiens in their genes.
Akey and his group reported at the beginning of July that modern humans spread from Africa and interbred with Neanderthals in Eurasia around 200,000–250,000 years ago.
Akey also found evidence of another early wave of migration when he compared Neanderthal fossils of different ages. That wave would have spread from Africa to Eurasia around 120,000 to 100,000 years ago.
The results of the study were reported by the scientific journal Science.
Migration waves has also been studied by a geneticist Sarah Tishkoff from the University of Pennsylvania.
He and his team compared the genetics of 180 living Africans with the genetics of an old Neanderthal fossil. Its DNA is from 122,000 years ago.
The work was published at the end of October 2023 by the science journal Current Biology.
The Africans involved in the study represented 12 different population groups from different parts of the continent. Geneticists discovered DNA from Africans that was also inherited by Neanderthals.
It was scattered in all 12 studied populations. From the size and order of the DNA sequences, Tishkoff was able to conclude that the Neanderthal had inherited them from early Africans.
“Africa has been moved many times and at different times”, sums up the Tishkoff newspaper in The New York Times (NOW).
Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo and his group published the first draft of Neanderthal inheritance in 2010.
Pääbo discovered that non-African people carry parts of Neanderthal DNA. It was a sign that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred long ago.
After the discovery, this information has been used in studies of human migration waves.
Paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati According to NYT, the University of Tübingen says that some human fossils in Europe and the Middle East could belong to these early waves.
In 2019, Harvati and his colleagues studied skull fragments found in Greece, which they said showed signs of homo sapiens anatomy. The skull fragments were estimated to be more than 210,000 years old.
The earliest representatives of Homo sapiens probably fought with Neanderthals for land and food.
However, Neanderthal populations declined, according to new research.
When the last wave of people from Africa spread over the world more than 50,000 years ago, modern humans probably already had more room for maneuver.
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