Genetics and material culture support repeated expansions into Paleolithic Eurasia from a population hub out of Africa

Abstract

The population dynamics that followed the out of Africa expansion (OoA) and ultimately led to the formation of Oceanian, West and East Eurasian macro populations have long been debated. Furthermore, with the OoA being dated between 70 kya and 65 kya and the earliest splits between West and East Eurasian populations being inferred not earlier than 43 kya from modern DNA data, an additional question concerns the whereabouts of the early migrants out of Africa before those differentiations. Shedding light on these population dynamics may, in turn, provide clues to better understand cultural evolution in Eurasia between 50 kya and 35 kya, where the development of new technologies may be correlated to parallel independent evolution paths, to the arrival of new populations, or to long-term processes of cultural and biological exchanges. Here we jointly re-analyze Eurasian Paleolithic DNA available to date in light of material culture, and provide a comprehensive population model with minimal admixture events. Our integrated approach i) maintains Zlaty Kůň genetically as the most basal out of Africa human lineage sequenced to date, also in comparison to Oceanians and putatively links it with non-Mousterian material cultures documented in Europe 48-43 kya; ii) infers the presence of an OoA population Hub from which a major wave broadly associated with Initial Upper Paleolithic lithic industries emanated to populate West and East Eurasia before or around 45 kya, and of which Ust′Ishim, Bacho Kiro and Tianyuan were unadmixed descendants; iii) proposes a parsimonious placement of Oase1 as an individual related to Bacho Kiro who experienced additional Neanderthal introgression; and iv) explains the East/West Eurasian population split as a longer permanence of the latter in the OoA Hub, followed by a second population expansion (before 37 kya), broadly associated with Upper Paleolithic industries, that largely replaced pre-existing humans in Europe, and admixed with the previous wave to form Yana and Mal′ta in Siberia and, to a greater extent, GoyetQ116-1 in Belgium.

Initial Human Colonization of the Americas, Redux

“…50,000 cal BP. This evidence is congruent with recent paleogenomic analyses of some of the earliest Homo sapiens specimens from Europe (Hajdinjak et al 2021; Prüfer et al 2021; Vallini et al 2021). The Ust-Ishim individual, represented by a femur dated to 41,400 rcbp (ca.…”

“…Earlier waves of Homo sapiens migration across northern Eurasia after ca. 50,000 cal BP (Hajdinjak et al 2021; Prüfer et al 2021; Vallini et al 2021), or even earlier expansions by pre- sapiens Denisovans, might conceivably have extended across Beringia into the Americas. We have no convincing archaeological or paleogenomic evidence for such ancient migrations, and if they did occur, these precursors must have either failed to thrive, or were ultimately replaced by proto-Clovis or Clovis people.…”

Assessing climatic impact on transition from Neanderthal to anatomically modern human population on Iberian Peninsula: a macroscopic perspective

“…Due to the low resolution of radiometric dating in this time frame and the rapid climate oscillations, the correlation of cultural change and climate change is still a challenge. Genome sequencing and paleoanthropological analyses indicate that contact and interbreeding between NEAs and AMHs took place in Southwestern Asia and Eastern Europe [14][15][16], but it is unclear whether such interactions occurred in Iberia and why the NEAs became extinct, i.e., whether the extinction was attributed to abrupt climate change [17], competitive exclusion [18], repeated migration by random species drift [19], inbreeding, allee effects and stochasticity [20] or interbreeding with AMHs [21], low efficiency in exploiting resources of the NEAs in comparison with the AMHs [22] or changes of available biomass [13]. The argument of "cognitive superiority" of the AMHs, which was favoured for decades, is now considered to be the least probable [23].…”