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The great explosion across the World Island

Last week I recorded an episode of The Insight with Chris Stringer. The topic du jour mostly had to do with Denisovans…but now I wish I’d waited a week. There would have been more to talk about!

Two new papers have confirmed and solidified the fact that modern humans expanded into Europe earlier than we had accepted.

A 14C chronology for the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition at Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria, and Initial Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria. The authors dated a cave inhabited by individuals with modern human remains “to 45,820–43,650 cal BP (95.4% probability), probably beginning from 46,940 cal BP (95.4% probability).” And, they obtained mtDNA. The results established that these individuals were basal non-Africans of haplogroup M. Today there are very few West Eurasians, and almost no native Europeans, who carry haplogroup M, which is frequent in India and parts east. But this is not the first M found in Europe during the Pleistocene. The point though is that in concert with the results for Oase in Romania roughly contemporaneous (if perhaps somewhat later), they establish strongly that the first modern humans in Europe did not leave descendants in the continent.

And, perhaps most intriguingly these results confirm that Neanderthals and modern humans existed in Europe for at least 7,000 years simultaneously. This puts paid to the idea that the period of interaction between these two groups was short. The authors even suggest that Neanderthal archaeological cultures exhibit modern human influence.

On a broader scale, these results bring balance and order back into the world. One stylized fact that has long been fascinating is that Australia seems to have been occupied by modern humans 5-10,000 years earlier than Europe. A reasonable explanation for this fact is that Neanderthals occupied Europe. But humans, we now know, tend to engage, interact, and migrate. Though there are older dates, very high confidence results indicate that humans reached Australia 49,000 years ago. This site would be only 2,000 years later, and it seems plausible that this wasn’t the first.

The best genetic evidence now suggests that at minimum modern humans began to diversify 200,000 years ago in Africa, though it is more likely that some lineages branched out earlier. Among “non-Africans,” some groups may have separated earlier, the “Basal Eurasians” (they may have less Neanderthal than the other non-Africans). But the majority expanded explosively ~50,000 years ago. These are the ancestors of European Pleistocene and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, and Oceanians, East Asians, and other eastern peoples.

Mitochondrial DNA is copious, so easy to extract. But often after mtDNA comes autosomal DNA. So hoping, hoping…

17 thoughts on “The great explosion across the World Island

  1. The autosomal DNA will be interesting. Will confirm is M is East Eurasian entirely or if some subclades are West Eurasian

  2. The results of modern human presence in Europe prior to 40K BP were inevitable since the Bohunician industry is thought to be a culture associated with anatomically modern humans. There were some people who were expecting a discontinuity between the earliest modern humans and the later Aurignacian humans in Europe due to the Campainian Ignambrite eruption.

  3. @Jatt_Scythian

    Well M as a whole definitely looks Eastern, only M1 could plausibly be considered West Eurasian. I really, really hope these guys are able to get autosomal DNA out of these samples so we can see what their genome wide affinities are.

    @Razib

    Sorry if you’ve answered this before, but how exactly are we able to date the bottleneck period of OoA to 50,000-60,000 years ago? Is it by looking at length and number of ROH fragments in Eurasian populations and comparing that against an African base-line?

    I’ve long suspected that there was internal Eurasian population structure before 50,000 years ago already. You mentioned human beings were already in Australia by 49,000 ybp, which means there had to be people in Southeast Asia, India, Iran, and Southwest Asia long before then. The most interesting thing to me is finding out where in that vast belt of land the Proto-Eurasians coalesced and eventually expanded out from to colonize the rest of the world, and when that boiling over took place precisely.

  4. “One stylized fact that has long been fascinating is that Australia seems to have been occupied by modern humans 5-10,000 years earlier than Europe. ”

    Wasn’t a good chunk of Europe covered with ice before the beginning of the Holocene? The stadial also lowered the sea level so that Austalia was more accessible.

  5. but how exactly are we able to date the bottleneck period of OoA to 50,000-60,000 years ago?

    now most ppl use psmc/msmc methods looking at the patterns of variation genome-wide. there’s a mutation rate parameter in there that gives you scale. i think it’s very fuzzy. the ‘basal eurasians’ share the bottleneck, so it seems likely they diverged before 60K, cuz neanderthal admixture is pretty well dated to 55-60K i think? (using the siberian genome)

  6. @Walter Sobchak

    That was mostly just Scandinavia and the Baltic region. Western Russia was inhabited by modern Homo Sapiens definitely around ~37,000 years ago while the Asian part has Ust Ishim from 45,000 years ago.

  7. Pretty amazing that they were able to get that level of precision with 14C dating. (It’s not usually that precise… is it?)

  8. According to Bernard: “The tooth and one of the bones have the same haplotype which belongs to the base of haplogroup M with two additional mutations unknown in the different current branches of M. Two samples are located at the base of haplogroup N with also two additional mutations unknown until now. The closest identified haplotype of these two samples is that of Oase1. A bone has a haplotype that belongs to the base of haplogroup R without additional mutation. Finally, the last sample belongs to the U8 haplogroup previously identified in different Upper Paleolithic sites.”

  9. Fascinating. The low number of mutations beyond mHG M, N, R in these Paleo samples suggests they lived close in time to the common ancestor of all Eurasians.

    Mutations happens in mtDNA every 2,500 years. These samples on average are 2.5 mutations away from M/N. That is 6,500 years according to that age estimate. Suggesting, all of Eurasia was colonsized by closely related groups of humans who lived together 50,000 years ago.

  10. @Sam

    What’s interesting though is I’ve seen papers which date the tMRCA of M, N, and R to well before 50,000 years, in the range of 60,000-70,000. Example:

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4460043/

    Table 1 dates tmrca of N to 60,000 years, but then bizarrely dates two primary branches, N10 and N11, to 66,000 and 76,000 ybp.

    This one dates R to 60,000 years (Table 1 again):

    https://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12862-017-0964-5/tables/1

  11. “The point though is that in concert with the results for Oase in Romania roughly contemporaneous (if perhaps somewhat later), they establish strongly that the first modern humans in Europe did not leave descendants in the continent.”

    This is nonsense. First, the fact that a person carried mtDNA thats is extinct in present day Europe doesn’t necessarily mean no ancestry was left. Second, these are not the first modern humans in Europe, these are the first *undisputably confirmed* modern humans in Europe. Chances are that the Bohunician (from 48 ky on) are the first AMH culture in Europe.

  12. This is nonsense. First, the fact that a person carried mtDNA thats is extinct in present day Europe doesn’t necessarily mean no ancestry was left.

    there is already work on ancient DNA which shows that very little of the >35K ancestry is in modern humans (really the vast majority of the ancestry from 15K and more recently). why are you being a smug asshole? explain yourself now or otherwise I’ll ban you (if you don’t know the paper I’m alluding you, you’re a dumbass and you should be banned for making a comment without knowing what you are talking about).

  13. Off topic but I have been looking at Spencer Wells’ twitter. Seems like he wants the US to full on collapse? At least he will be on the good side of our future Chinese overlords.

  14. @Mick:
    Ancient DNA evidence outweighs studies of modern DNA. This goes for the ages of early haplogroups as well as their geographic origin, e.g. inferences based on modern DNA describing the origin of mtDNA M, R etc. as “eastern”.

  15. Off topic: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-ancient-dna-unveils-important-piece.html – “Ancient DNA unveils important missing piece of human history” – “Newly released genomes from Neolithic East Asia have unveiled a missing piece of human prehistory, according to a study conducted by Prof. Fu Qiaomei’s team from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.”

    Got to read, but big finding seems like: Notably, this includes the Early Neolithic southern East Asians dating to ~8,000 years from this study that should have been “first layer” early Asians, according to the earlier hypothesis. In fact, Prof. Fu and her team showed that they shared a closer relationship to present-day “second layer” East Asians.

    Looks like the idea (if anyone held it) that Southern China was populated at 6000 BCE by “first layer” people is wrong and was later overwritten by Yellow River migrations, not correct? I’ll have to read the paper fully to see if this is right.

  16. Hi Razib,

    what is your take on the claim that the Basal Eurasians were merely a very old North or East African population that is related to Taforalt? What speaks against BE not being “Eurasian”?

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