An international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute and the University of Hawaii at Manoa have come to the conclusion that ancient Homo sapiens left Africa several times and mixed with other hominids. New paleontological findings force us to revise the classical concepts in the framework of the hypothesis of the African origin of man, according to which people evolved on the Black Continent and 60 thousand years ago in one wave of migration settled around the planet. The researchers' article was published in the journal Science.
The conclusions were drawn in light of new data obtained from the analysis of archaic DNA and ancient fossils of H. sapiens found in Southeast Asia. Human remains, whose age reaches 70-120 thousand years, were found in South and Central China. The results of recent genetic studies have shown that two percent of the genome of the Aborigines of Papua New Guinea is inherited from ancestors who left Africa earlier than 60 thousand years ago.
On the other hand, from the results of the complete decoding of the genomes, it is known that all modern non-African human populations separated from their ancestors living on the Black Continent during the late Pleistocene. Scientists believe that this contradiction is explained by the fact that even before the main wave of migration that occurred 60 thousand years ago, people migrated from Africa to Eurasia in small groups.
The early settlers mixed with other ancient hominids - Neanderthals, Denisovans, and as yet unidentified species. Thus, the genome of almost all modern non-Africans includes 1-4 percent of Neanderthal DNA, while in Melanesians 5 percent of DNA is inherited from Denisovans. According to the latest scientific data, interbreeding may have started between 40 and about 200 thousand years ago.
According to the authors, the well-established definition of the hypothesis "a man from Africa", according to which the ancestors of all modern people moved from the Black continent 60 thousand years ago and drove out the indigenous inhabitants of Eurasia, can no longer be considered valid.
