Genetic Study Reveals Humanity's Longest Migration:
Modern humans are thought to have walked out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, and they kept going until they reached every habitable part of the planet. Researchers have now revealed more about the longest migration in human history. Reporting in Science, a new study has indicated that early Asians embarked on the longest prehistory migration of humans in history. This trek was over 20,000 kilometers long (12,427 miles), and took multiple generations of people traveling over thousands of years, as they moved from North Asia to the southernmost part of South America, on foot. Ice bridges are thought to have made this route possible.
This study involved a genetic analysis of over 1,537 individuals who are meant to represent 139 diverse ethnic groups. Patterns of ancestry were analyzed, such as sequences that were shared among individuals, or variations that arose and accumulated over time. These differences and similarities showed how various groups moved, adapted, and split apart as they encountered new environments during their journey from Africa, to North Asia, and finally to Tierra del Fuego in what is now Argentina.
The study found that people got to the northwestern tip of South America about 14,000 years ago. They split into groups after that: some stayed in the Amazon; others moved into an area known as Dry Chaco and some continued onto the ice fields of Southern Patagonia or the peaks and valleys of the Andes.
The work suggested that as people migrated, they also encountered many environmental challenges, which they sometimes overcame.
"Those migrants carried only a subset of the gene pool in their ancestral populations through their long journey. Thus, the reduced genetic diversity also caused a reduced diversity in immune-related genes, which can limit a population's flexibility to fight various infectious diseases," noted corresponding study author Kim Hie Lim, an Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore (NTU), among other appointments.
"This could explain why some Indigenous communities were more susceptible to illnesses or diseases introduced by later immigrants, such as European colonists. Understanding how past dynamics have shaped the genetic structure of today's current population can yield deeper insights into human genetic resilience."
Academic institutions from around the world were part of this project, which was supported by the GenomeAsia100K consortium, a nonprofit effort to analyze Asian genomes to advance precision medicine and biomedical research.
"Our study shows that a greater diversity of human genomes is found in Asian populations, not European ones, as has long been assumed due to sampling bias in large-scale genome sequencing projects," added penultimate study author Stephan Schuster, an NTU Professor, among other appointments.
Sources: Nanyang Technological University of Singapore (NTU)
Journal Reference: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk5081
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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Humans come from Africa. This wasn’t always obvious, but today it seems as close to certain as anything about our origins.
There are two senses in which this is true. The oldest known hominins, creatures more closely related to us than to great apes, are all from Africa, going back as far as 7 million years ago. And the oldest known examples of our species, Homo sapiens, are also from Africa.
It’s the second story I’m focusing on here, the origin of modern humans in Africa and their subsequent expansion all around the world. With the advent of DNA sequencing in the second half of the 20th century, it became possible to compare the DNA of people from different populations. This revealed that African peoples have the most variety in their genomes, while all non-African peoples are relatively similar at the genetic level (no matter how superficially different we might appear in terms of skin colour and so forth).
In genetic terms, this is what we might call a dead giveaway. It tells us that Africa was our homeland and that it was populated by a diverse group of people – and that everyone who isn’t African is descended from a small subset of the peoples, who left this homeland to wander the globe. Geneticists were confident about this as early as 1995, and the evidence has only accumulated since.
And yet, the physical archaeology and the genetics don’t match – at least, not on the face of it.
Genetics tells us that all living non-African peoples are descended from a small group that left the continent around 50,000 years ago. Barring some wobbles about the exact date, that has been clear for two decades. But archaeologists can point to a great many instances of modern humans living outside Africa much earlier than that.
What is going on? Is our wealth of genetic data somehow misleading us? Or is it true that we are all descended from that last big migration – and the older bones represent populations that didn’t survive?
Eleanor Scerri at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany and her colleagues have tried to find an explanation.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 02, @12:09PM
Southern South America - 21,000 years ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/butchered-animal-bones-indicate-earliest-human-presence-southern-south-america-2024-07-17/ [reuters.com]
Australia - more than 70,000 years ago
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/19/dig-finds-evidence-of-aboriginal-habitation-up-to-80000-years-ago [theguardian.com]
See also: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-footprints-affirm-people-lived-in-the-americas-more-than-20-000-years-ago/ [scientificamerican.com]
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/humans-were-in-south-america-at-least-25000-years-ago-giant-sloth-bone-pendants-reveal [livescience.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Username on Wednesday July 02, @01:46PM
1.) People obsessed with race and genetics are the worst people on the planet.
2.) If they're not alive they didn't migrate that distance. It's multiple migrations, not a single one.
3.) Leave indigenous graves alone.
(Score: 4, Funny) by turgid on Wednesday July 02, @08:14PM (2 children)
I mean, they ended up in Scotland, with the cold, the rain and the midges. What went wrong?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday July 02, @09:06PM
They went to play golf on Turnberry resort (that was stupid) and got stuck by airport workers strike?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03, @01:17AM
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday July 03, @04:50AM
Ice bridges? Wouldn't that have been a time when sea levels were a lot lower because of widespread glaciation? So there would be land connections where there now are none? Or have i got my millennia mixed up?
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by bzipitidoo on Thursday July 03, @05:50AM
It's quite incredible that modern humans have been in the Americas for only 25,000 years at most. On geologic time scales, that's an eye blink.
We're still in the dawn of humanity. Whether there will be a noontide is a big question.
Seems that one of our biggest problems is our savage, brutally competitive past that still marks us. Uncomfortably many of us still carry that unlimited competitiveness in our deepest instincts. I have observed that the conservatives obsess over all matters sexual, constantly fearing that they will be "cucked", or stay frustrated incels. Bigotry and too much willingness to resort to violence in service of that bigotry is a far bigger and more dangerous problem than many of us realized. That in combination with their idiocy is scary. Those nuts could bumble into a nuclear war and get us all killed off. We can be thankful that in WWII, the Axis didn't have nukes. And that the Cold War stayed cold. Let us hope our generation and future ones can maintain this taboo against using nuclear weapons.