2024-09-09 01:53:31
Contemporary DNA analysis suggests that modern humans are descended from at least two populations that coexisted, migrated and interbred in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years.
There is considerable consensus among the scientific community that the origins of A wise man are found in Africa. There is a lot of evidence pointing in that direction. The oldest fossils of our species come from the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco, with an approximate age of about 300,000 years. Around the same time, the hand axes that had dominated the stone tool inventory for a million years became much rarer. Instead, new tools were made by shaping blades taken from a large core of stone that had previously been discarded.
What has been more difficult to identify is the specific group within Africa which would eventually become the ancestor of all humans outside that continent. One evolutionary theory holds that about 150,000 years ago there was a single ancestral population from which the rest derived. Other research has suggested that this primitive community would have been the result of the mixing of modern humans with other hominids, such as Neanderthals.
However, a new scientific study just published in Nature has revealed a surprising and more complex origin for the A wise manGenetic findings by an international team led by researchers from the University of California-Davis and McGill University (Canada) reveal that modern humans are descended from at least two populations that coexisted, migrated and interbred in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years before giving rise to the new lineage in a process of separation that occurred between 135,000 and 120,000 years ago.
Image of the excavations at the Jebel Irhoud site. MPI EVA Leipzig
“Those who have opted for the classic model of a single origin for the A wise man have suggested that humans first emerged in eastern or southern Africa,” he explains. Burn hera geneticist and one of the co-lead authors of the paper. “But it has been difficult to square these theories with the limited fossil and archaeological records from sites as far away as Morocco, Ethiopia and South Africa, which show that sapiens lived across the continent for at least 300,000 years.”
Scientists developed a computer model to run large-scale simulations of the genetic evolution of the human species. The method consisted of analyzing 290 genomes of current Africansbelonging to four geographically and genetically diverse groups—the Nama, a Khoe-San pastoralist group from Namibia; the Mende from Sierra Leone; the Gumuz, a tribe descended from hunter-gatherers from Ethiopia; and the Amhara and Oromo, farming peoples from the east of the continent—to trace similarities and differences among them over the past million years. Another goal was to gain insight into genetic connections across Africa.
Source: THE SPANISH