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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Hints of an early exodus of modern humans from Africa may have been detected in living humans.

People outside Africa overwhelmingly trace their descent to a group that left the continent 60,000 years ago.

Now, analysis of nearly 500 human genomes appears to have turned up the weak signal of an earlier migration [bbc.com].

But the results suggest this early wave of Homo sapiens all but vanished, so it does not drastically alter prevailing theories of our origins.

And two separate studies in the academic journal Nature failed to find the signal of a later movement.

Writing in Nature [nature.com], Luca Pagani, Mait Metspalu and colleagues describe hints of this pioneer group in their analysis of DNA in people from the Oceanian nation of Papua New Guinea.

The researchers examining the DNA in Papua New Guinea found the traces of the earlier migration by subtracting the DNA from the more recent migration out of Africa 60,000 years ago and the DNA from the Denisovans [wikipedia.org].

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