A new fascinating study reveals humans were living in different regions of Africa, migrating from one region to another and mixing with one another over a period of hundreds of thousands of years.
Decades of study on human evolution point towards a tree-like genome model, which suggests that humans evolved from a single ancestral population in Africa. The study says it’s been hard to extrapolate the model with the findings of archaeological and fossilized records of human occupation across the continent.
They concluded that contemporary populations descended from two of the earliest human populations in Africa that had been around for hundreds of thousands of years.
The researchers observed two merger events. The first resulted in the formation of an ancestral Khoe-San population in Southern Africa around 120,000 years ago. The second event resulted in the formation of the ancestors of Eastern and Western Africans, including the ancestors of people outside Africa about 100,000 years ago.
The researchers told the New York Times that they are now adding more genomes from people in other parts of Africa to see if they affect the tree models.
