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Agence France-Presse

No longer can the tale of one single human migration out of Africa 60,000 years ago be considered an accurate history of humankind, a review of scientific literature showed on Thursday.
Rather, multiple migrations out of Africa, beginning 120,00 years ago, gave rise to the modern population of people, said the findings in the US journal Science.
Advances in DNA analysis and other fossil identification techniques, particularly regarding discoveries in Asia, are helping to rewrite what we thought we knew about our origins.
A “plethora of new discoveries” over the past decade has shown that modern humans, or Homo sapiens, reached parts of the Asian continent much earlier than previously thought, said the report.
Homo sapiens remains have been found at multiple sites in southern and central China, going back to between 70,000 and 120,000 years ago.
Fleshing out the past: ancient Chinese skulls offer strong evidence that Neanderthals reached East Asia
Other fossil discoveries show that modern humans reached Southeast Asia and Australia before 60,000 years ago.
“The initial dispersals out of Africa before 60,000 years ago were likely by small groups of foragers, and at least some of these early dispersals left low-level genetic traces in modern human populations,” said Michael Petraglia, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. “A later, major ‘Out of Africa’ event most likely occurred around 60,000 years ago or thereafter.”

Recent research has confirmed that this mass migration 60,000 years ago “contributed the bulk of the genetic make-up of present-day non-Africans,” said the report.
These early voyagers interbred with other species, including Neanderthals and Denisovans and one currently unidentified population of pre-modern hominids, in many locations across Eurasia.
Scientists estimate that among modern non-Africans today, one to four per cent of the DNA comes from Neanderthals and as much as five per cent may be from Denisovans.
“It is now clear that modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and perhaps other hominid groups likely overlapped in time and space in Asia, and they certainly had many instances of interaction,” said the study.


Human beings migrated out of Africa in several waves, says study

In this 2014 file photo, visitors take pictures of models representing Flores, human and Neanderthal women in a new science and anthropology museum in Lyon, France. Multiple migrations out of Africa are now believed to have populated the world. Photo: AP

FILE - This Friday, March 20, 2009 file photo shows reconstructions of a Neanderthal man named "N", left, and woman called "Wilma", right, at the Neanderthal museum in Mettmann, Germany. Trying to explain cases of ancient cannibalism among our evolutionary forerunners is a vexing scientific challenge. A new study released Thursday, April 6, 2017 in the Journal Scientific Reports suggests that whatever the reasons, they were probably not hunting each other just for food. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

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Science & Research

Homo sapiens found in China go back up to 120,000 years
