A dispersal of Homo sapiens from southern to eastern Africa immediately preceded the out-of-Africa migration

Abstract

Africa was the birth-place of Homo sapiens and has the earliest evidence for symbolic behaviour and complex technologies. The best-attested early flowering of these distinctive features was in a glacial refuge zone on the southern coast 100–70 ka, with fewer indications in eastern Africa until after 70 ka. Yet it was eastern Africa, not the south, that witnessed the first major demographic expansion, ~70–60 ka, which led to the peopling of the rest of the world. One possible explanation is that important cultural traits were transmitted from south to east at this time. Here we identify a mitochondrial signal of such a dispersal soon after ~70 ka – the only time in the last 200,000 years that humid climate conditions encompassed southern and tropical Africa. This dispersal immediately preceded the out-of-Africa expansions, potentially providing the trigger for these expansions by transmitting significant cultural elements from the southern African refuge.

Trajectories of cultural innovation from the Middle to Later Stone Age in Eastern Africa: Personal ornaments, bone artifacts, and ocher from Panga ya Saidi, Kenya

“…The emergence of innovations such as the use of mineral pigments, the wearing of ornaments and the production of abstract engravings has traditionally been interpreted as the direct consequence of cognitive changes linked to the origin of our species in Africa (McBrearty and Brooks, 2000;Henshilwood and Marean, 2003;Shea, 2011;Bruner, 2014;Marean, 2015;Coolidge andWynn, 2017, Rito et al, 2019). A significant debate crosscutting archaeology, palaeoanthropology and archaeogenetics has persisted over whether cultural modernity originated and spread uniquely with anatomically modern Homo sapiens (Stringer and Andrews, 1989;Relethford and Harpending, 1994;Klein, 1995;Agani et al, 2011;Henn et al, 2012; see Rito et al, 2019 for an update of this view) or whether it emerged in the context of biological and cultural interactions between diverse hominid populations in disparate climatic and geographic settings (Gunz et al, 2009;Hublin et al, 2017;Neubauer et al, 2018;Scerri et al, 2018).…”

A different view on fine-scale population structure in Western African populations

“…African populations are the oldest populations in the evolution of modern human species, given its single origin in the African continent between 200,000 years ago [as indicated by mitochondrial DNA; (reviewed in Rito et al 2013)] and 350,000 years ago (by nuclear DNA; Schlebusch et al 2017), dates which are corroborated by archaeological evidence (Hublin et al 2017;Richter et al 2017). Europeans and Asians descended from a small group of Africans that migrated out-of-Africa around 60,000 years ago (see discussion around the theme of origin and date of the out-of-Africa group in (Rito et al 2019). Africa covers some 20% of earth's total land surface, amounting to 30 million km 2 of diverse biomes from rainforest to woodland to savanna to desert to Mediterranean littoral environments.…”

Regional patterns of diachronic technological change in the Howiesons Poort of southern Africa

“…This view was first popularized in models of cultural evolution within southern Africa [ 19 , 21 , 44 ]. Subsequently, some scholars exported and borrowed these ideas on larger scales of Africa and beyond [ 23 – 25 , 27 , 64 ]. These studies have viewed the HP as a cultural unit with high behavioral complexity in contrast to the more variable and changing nature of the archaeological record before and after (e.g.…”

“…sapiens in this region by abrupt and discontinuous cultural change, materialized by two short periods of exceptional cultural innovation. Other researchers have inferred a spread of these elements to the north and out of Africa, integrating them into larger-scale models for the evolution and dispersal of Homo sapiens [ 23 – 27 ]. This being said, more recent research within the southern African MSA has criticized this model of discontinuous evolution of cultural capacities on both empirical and theoretical grounds [ 28 – 35 ].…”