Asia, a more likely source for the early human populations

Aug 7, 2007 06:59 GMT  ·  By

Africa may have been the cradle of the human evolution, but it scarcely shared its human populations with the chilly Europe. The first species of Homo entering Europe appears to have come rather from Asia, than Africa. An international research team has found that Asians played a more important role in the settlement of Europe than Africans did.

The team was led by Maria Martinon-Torres of the National Center for the Investigation of Human Evolution, in Burgos, Spain and reached this result after investigating over 5,000 fossil teeth from early hominid species, Homo erectus, H. antecessor, H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthaliensis.

The ancient teeth from Africa, Asia and Europe revealed that early European populations displayed more Asian features than African ones. This also enhances the hypothesis that the development of the genus Homo, to which we, Homo sapiens, belong, took place both in Africa and Asia.

"The history of human populations in Eurasia may not have been the result of a few high-impact replacement waves of dispersals from Africa, but a much more complex puzzle of dispersals," wrote the team.

"The differences in tooth formation, dimensions and shapes in Europe and Asia and that of Africa suggest separate evolutionary courses for a long period. That doesn't mean there was no genetic flow between Africa and Eurasia, but rather that the Eurasians were probably descendants of an ancient out-of-Africa exodus," they said.

"The idea that human evolution involved small and relatively isolated populations for much of its history, with a migration out of Africa and other migrations between continents is in concordance with the interpretations of paleoanthropologists," said Milford Wolpoff, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, who praised the researchers as dental evidence is very difficult to work with.

"It may be in different languages, but we are singing the same song," said Wolpoff, not involved in this research.

Even the modern Homo sapiens racial types in Europe came from Asia. The blond Indo-Europeans arrived 5,000 years ago from Central Asia while the pre-Indo-European dark haired Ibero-Caucasians had come from Caucasus area or southwestern Asia about 10,000 years ago, following the separation of the continent from ice at the end of the Ice Age. Later invasions of Mongoloid race tribes, such as the Huns, also came from Asia.