A few weeks ago I wrote on my Substack about a new model of African H. sapiens genesis that assumes recurrent gene flow between deeply divergent populations within the continent. In contrast, the out-of-Africa movement was defined by a rapid expansion from a small ancestral founding group that diversified over the last 50,000 years. But there is a twist to this: the out-of-Africa event was presaged by many earlier expansions outward.. The Neandersovans were one clear example, about 600,000 years ago. But there were others. We know this because Neanderthal Y and mtDNA seems to be more closely related to modern humans than the whole genome, and the Altai Neanderthal shows clear evidence of modern human admixture as early as 100,000 years ago, far earlier than the primary out-of-Africa event 50,000 years ago.
Laos cave fossils prompt rethink of human migration map:
Archaeologists have uncovered two new bone fragments in a cave in northern Laos, suggesting that Homo sapiens wandered southeast Asia up to 86,000 years ago. The findings, published this week in Nature Communications1, indicate that humans migrated through the area earlier than previously thought.
Over more than a decade, excavations in the Tam Pà Ling cave have uncovered seven bone fragments sandwiched between layers of clay. Laura Shackelford, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, and her colleagues have regularly had to hike through sticky tropical heat to reach the mountain-top cave.
After digging 7 metres down, excavations have finally hit bedrock, and the team has been able to reconstruct a complete chronology of the cave, says Shackelford. Sediment and bones unearthed in the cave show that modern humans have inhabited the mountainous region for at least 68,000 years, and passed through even earlier.
These archaeological findings seem to solidify the idea of modern (African) humans in Southeast Asia. They don’t seem to have left an imprint, but that’s OK, the first modern Europeans didn’t either.