Our fractured African roots

Our African ancestors were diverse in form and culture, and scattered across the entire continent, finds a team led by UCL, the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. These findings challenge the idea that humans, or Homo sapiens , stemmed from a single, large ancestral population in one region of Africa which randomly exchanged genes and technologies like stone tools. The research, published today in Trends in Ecology and Evolution , argues that human ancestors did evolve in Africa but were scattered across continent, largely kept apart by a combination of diverse habitats and shifting environmental boundaries, such as forests and deserts. By studying bones (anthropology), stone tools (archaeology) and genes (population genomics), alongside new and detailed reconstructions of Africa's climates and habitats over the last 300,000 years, the team investigated how humans evolved within the continent. Their findings suggest that millennia of separation gave rise to a staggering diversity of human forms, whose mixing ultimately shaped our species. "Stone tools and other artefacts - usually referred to as material culture - have remarkably clustered distributions in space and through time," said Dr Eleanor Scerri, researcher at the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and lead author of the study. "While there is a continental-wide trend towards more sophisticated material culture, this 'modernization' clearly doesn't originate in one region or occur at one time period." The genetic part of the study agreed with these findings.