The Persian plateau served as hub for Homo sapiens after the main out of Africa dispersal

Abstract

A combination of evidence, based on genetic, fossil and archaeological findings, indicates that Homo sapiens spread out of Africa between ~70-60 thousand years ago (kya). However, it appears that once outside of Africa, human populations did not expand across all of Eurasia until ~45 kya. The geographic whereabouts of these early settlers in the timeframe between ~70-60 to 45 kya has been difficult to reconcile. Here we combine genetic evidence and palaeoecological models to infer the geographic location that acted as the Hub for our species during the early phases of colonisation of Eurasia. Leveraging on available genomic evidence we show that populations from the Persian Plateau carry an ancestry component that closely matches the population that settled the Hub outside Africa. With the paleoclimatic data available to date, we built ecological models showing that the Persian Plateau was suitable for human occupation and that it could sustain a larger population compared to other West Asian regions, strengthening this claim.

Disentangling Human Nature: Environment, Evolution and Our Existential Predicament

“…However, Raia et al [14] have noted that, unlike other Homo species whose extinction may have been primarily driven by climate change, H. sapiens widened its climatic niche. Under this scenario, the recent findings concerning our earliest dispersal into Eurasia ⁓70-200 ka [15][16][17][18][19] and the interbreeding with other hominins such as H. neanderthalensis and Denisovans [20,21] further strengthen the view that the plasticity of the human socio-cognitive niche [22] has proven effective in penetrating Earth's ecosystems. On this basis, it is evident that this ecological flexibility has enabled our species to adapt and specialise in a wide variety of Late Pleistocene environments [23].…”

Pathogenic variants in human DNA damage repair genes mostly arose after the latest human out-of-Africa migration

“…Modern non-African humans (hereafter: non-African) were the direct descendants of the latest out-of-Africa human migrants that occurred 50,000–60,000 years ago ( Hublin, et al, 2017 ) staying largely in Persian Plateau and spread to the world 45,000 years ago ( Vallini et al, 2024 ). The non-African migrants were more homogeneous than the ancestral African due to the founder effects and the bottleneck effects of small population size when out-of-Africa migration occurred ( Tishkoff, et al, 2009 ).…”