What Does It Mean If Humans Originated In Europe

Gene backflow theory holds that different groups — probably Homo erectus in Africa, Homo denisova in southern Asia, and Australopithecus in southern India and Australia — experienced admixture when modern humans flowed out of Eurasia into other continents.

This contrasts “Out of Africa” theory, which holds that humans developed in Africa and then went to other continents where they somehow evolved into different races, basing itself on the commonality of modern human in varying degrees between the different continental groups.

Recent research clobbered that theory by showing pre-modern hominins evolution unique to Europe:

The fossil, uncovered at the Çorakyerler site with support from Türkiye’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, reveals that Mediterranean fossil apes were more diverse than previously thought.

These apes are part of the earliest known group of hominins, which includes not only African apes like chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas but also humans and their fossil ancestors.

“Our findings further suggest that hominines not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over five million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa, probably as a consequence of changing environments and diminishing forests,” explained Professor Begun.

They explain the backflow as happening before the evolution of modern humans. Evolas laugh and say that modern humans have been around since the dawn of time and the hominins were degraded versions of that original strain.

Others see this as simply a form of parallel evolution, which means that nature was working on the same rough idea in multiple places, and later these threads converged in modern humans and spread through backflow.

In any case, this research suggests a larger prehistoric human story than has previously been recognized, including transit between Eurasian and African hominins who were previously thought to be highly localized:

Study co-senior author David Begun, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto, clarified that they are talking about the common ancestor of hominines, and not about the human lineage after it diverged from the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives.

“Since that divergence, most of human evolutionary history has occurred in Africa,” Begun told Live Science. “It is also most likely that the chimpanzee and human lineages diverged from each other in Africa.”

In the new study, the researchers analyzed a newly identified ape fossil from the 8.7 million-year-old site of Çorakyerler in central Anatolia. They dubbed the species Anadoluvius turkae. “Anadolu” is the modern Turkish word for Anatolia, and “turk” refers to Turkey.

Most likely, gene flow has been an ongoing pattern as groups of ancient animals went south as temperatures fell, which we can see from modern gene flow into Africa from Europe:

Gallego Llorente et al. sequenced an Ethiopian individual, “Mota,” who lived approximately 4500 years ago, predating one such wave of individuals into Africa from Eurasia. The genetic information from Mota suggests that present-day Sardinians were the likely source of the Eurasian backflow. Furthermore, 4 to 7% of most African genomes, including Yoruba and Mbuti Pygmies, originated from this Eurasian gene flow.

It seems that the Nordic-Germanic origin of all Europeans was more ancient than previously surmised:

We obtained a genome sequence from Kostenki 14 in European Russia dating from 38,700 to 36,200 years ago, one of the oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans from Europe. We find that Kostenki 14 shares a close ancestry with the 24,000-year-old Mal’ta boy from central Siberia, European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, some contemporary western Siberians, and many Europeans, but not eastern Asians. Additionally, the Kostenki 14 genome shows evidence of shared ancestry with a population basal to all Eurasians that also relates to later European Neolithic farmers. We find that Kostenki 14 contains more Neandertal DNA that is contained in longer tracts than present Europeans. Our findings reveal the timing of divergence of western Eurasians and East Asians to be more than 36,200 years ago and that European genomic structure today dates back to the Upper Paleolithic and derives from a metapopulation that at times stretched from Europe to central Asia.

This suggests that perhaps the Eurasian group, who ranged from Siberia to Britain, were more mobile than others and have been constantly flowing back into Africa, contributing DNA just like the Neanderthals before them did.