Scientists have finally found out where the first people went after leaving Africa

Our species appeared in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, while migration from the continent began 60-70,000 years ago, marking Homo sapiens the beginning of the global spread. However, for a long time it was an unsolved question for scientists, where these people went after leaving Africa, the Independent writes about it.

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Experts now conclude that groups of these people lived for thousands of years as a homogeneous population in a geographic center encompassing Iran, southeastern Iraq, and northeastern Saudi Arabia, and only then, about 45,000 years ago, began to populate all of Asia and Europe.

Their conclusions were based on genomic datasets from ancient DNA and modern gene pools, combined with paleoecological data that indicated which region was the ideal habitat. However, thousands of years later, these people continued their journey to more distant places.

According to researchers, these people lived in small mobile groups of hunter-gatherers. Their habitats offered a variety of ecological conditions: from forests to grasslands with savannas and alternating dry and wet periods. hunter-gatherer groups seem to have lived a seasonal lifestyle, living in the lowlands during the cooler months and the highlands during the warmer months.

The people who inhabited the areas mentioned at that time must have had dark skin and dark hair, which probably resembled the people who now live in parts of East Africa. Their later dispersal in various directions outside the mentioned area, in turn, laid the foundation for the genetic divergence of modern East Asians and Europeans.

However Homo sapiens were not the first human species to live outside of Africa. Neanderthals have been seen also in Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia before Homo sapiens arrival, so this area could very well have been the site of interaction between the two.

The oldest Homo sapiens fossil remains, about 300,000 years old, have been found in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. They are 100,000 years older than previously found human remains.

This is the first such find in North Africa and extends the range of the ‘cradle of mankind’. Previously, similar findings were in East Africa.

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