Where did modern people originate, asks the India Today Science Desk? The answer to this question is crucial to understanding evolution since, up until recently, it was thought that all of us sprang from a single set of ancestors who left Africa.
A recent study suggests that contemporary humans are descended from two groups that existed in Africa separately for a million years before mixing together across the continent, proving that there is no single location where humanity originated.
Despite widespread agreement that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, the study published in the journal Nature claims that there is a great deal of doubt surrounding certain theories of divergence and migration throughout the continent.
An overwhelmingly tree-like model of recent population divergence from a single ancestral population in Africa has been proposed by decades of research on human genomic variation. According to the researchers that published the study, “it has been challenging to square this finding with the fossil and archaeological records of human settlement over the enormous African continent.