Submitted by Christine Alexander on Mon, 05/10/2015 - 15:01
This new paper, with contributions from Aylwyn Scally, addresses the question of when modern humans first emerged from Africa and spread across Europe and Asia. For a long time it was thought that the available evidence pointed towards an exodus 50,000 years ago. However in this paper they show that both new and existing data are also compatible with older dates, and the possibility emerges that some of our ancestors may have left Africa as early as 100,000 years ago.
The figure shows the alternative ancestral demographic models they considered.
Full details : Groucutt, H. S., Petraglia, M. D., Bailey, G., Scerri, E. M. L., Parton, A., Clark-Balzan, L., Jennings, R. P., Lewis, L., Blinkhorn, J., Drake, N. A., Breeze, P. S., Inglis, R. H., Devès, M. H., Meredith-Williams, M., Boivin, N., Thomas, M. G. and Scally, A. (2015), Rethinking the dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa. Evol. Anthropol., 24: 149–164. doi: 10.1002/evan.21455