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The early migrants were hunter-gatherers, like the
people depicted in this much more recent rock art from South Africa
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Hints of an early exodus of modern humans from Africa may have been detected in living humans.
Present-day people outside Africa were thought to descend from a group that left their homeland 60,000 years ago. Now, analysis of nearly 500 human genomes appears to have turned up the weak signal of an earlier migration.
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The faint signature of an earlier out of Africa migration may be found in people from Papua New Guinea
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But the results suggest this early wave of
Homo sapiens all but vanished, so it does not drastically alter prevailing theories of our origins.
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Fossil evidence from Israel, like this individual
from Qafzeh cave, suggests modern humans were already living outside
Africa at least 90,000 years ago
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Writing
in the academic journal Nature,
Luca Pagani, Mait Metspalu and colleagues describe hints of this
pioneer group in their analysis of DNA in people from the Oceanian
nation of Papua New Guinea.
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Teeth from Daoxian suggest Homo sapiens had reached southern China by at least 80,000 years ago
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After evolving in Africa 200,000 years
ago, modern humans are thought to have crossed through Egypt into the
Arabian Peninsula some 60,000 years ago.
Until now, genetic evidence has shown that every non-African alive today could trace their origins to this fateful dispersal. Yet we had known for some time that groups of modern humans made forays outside their "homeland" before 60,000 years ago.
- Fossilised remains found at the Qafzeh and Es Skhul caves in Israel had been dated to between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago.
- Then in 2015, scientists working in Daoxian, south China, reported the discovery of modern human teeth dating to at least 80,000 years ago.
- An additional piece of evidence recently came from traces of Homo sapiens DNA
in a female Neanderthal from Siberia's Altai mountains. The analysis
suggested that modern humans and Neanderthals had begun mixing around
100,000 years ago - presumably outside Africa.