The origin of the human being may be different from what we know so far

An article published in the magazine nature challenges common sense about the origin of human beings. The new study contradicts the most accepted theory, which has been around for many years, that the homo sapiens would have emerged from a single ancestral population in eastern or southern Africa.

With a powerful computer model and the analysis of genetic data, Canadian and US scientists suggest that humanity descends, in fact, from various primitive groups scattered throughout the African territory.

Specifically, the team led by anthropologist Brenna Henn, a professor at the University of California, Davis, points to two distinct populations that coexisted in parallel for about a million years before mixing across the continent.

“We don’t know where they lived, but they were far enough away from each other for small genetic differences to occur between the groups,” the researcher told BBC News Mundo.

It is a fact that our ancestors emerged in Africa at least 300,000 years ago, as this is the estimated age of the oldest fossil associated with modern humans ever found. However, since there are not many such fossils dating from this early period in our evolutionary history, it is very difficult to make conclusive analyses.

Additionally, the geographic distribution of the remains confuses understanding of how the species emerged and spread across the African continent before spreading across the globe.

Archaeologist Eleanor Scerri, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, participated in a study in 2018 that ended up becoming one of the foundations for the new discoveries.

“We analyze archaeological, fossil, genetic and climatic data and demonstrate that humans evolved from different populations in Africa. We call this model African multi-regionalism or pan-African structured model”, explains the scientist. “Currently, we say genetic models should incorporate structured scenarios, and we encourage geneticists to do so.”

According to her, if this were drawn, the pattern is likely to “look more like intertwined grape vines than a tree of life.” The intertwining of these branches, with fragile separations caused by genetic differences, gave rise to an evolutionary concept that the researchers of the new study describe as “a loosely structured branch”.

To arrive at these results, the team led by Henn made use of a powerful computer model. “The team used software developed by one of the authors, Simon Gravel, of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, which was able to coordinate the large computational power needed for the extended model,” the article states.

Then, genome sequencing data from 290 people currently living in East and West Africa and members of the Nama people, who live in southern Africa, were incorporated.

They then created distinct scenarios of populations existing in Africa during different time periods and examined which ones might produce the DNA diversity found in people alive today.

According to the article, this dissemination of genomic data has helped researchers understand and track the historical movement of genes across generations. This is how they determined that every human being is descended from at least two distinct populations that lived in Africa a million years ago.

In addition, genome data from 91 European citizens were also analyzed to account for the influence of the postcolonial era and Neanderthals, the extinct human species that was concentrated in Europe until about 40,000 years ago.

Whether or not the conclusions of Henn’s article are confirmed, there is no longer any doubt that the complexity of the origin of our species will continue to be the object of studies increasingly supported by technological evolution.

The post Origin of Humans may be different from what we know so far first appeared in Olhar Digital.

Source: Olhar Digital