PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—The migration of hominins out of Africa may have been driven by climatic changes, a study suggests. Genomic studies have suggested that humans underwent a population bottleneck around 0.9 million years ago, but a recent study* of early archaeological sites suggested that this bottleneck occurred around 1.1 million years ago. The dating discrepancy makes it challenging to identify climatic events that may have contributed to a bottleneck. Giovanni Muttoni and Dennis Kent reevaluated the stratigraphic records of early hominin sites across Eurasia to explore the timing and drivers of a hominin population bottleneck. The authors identified a concentration of Eurasian hominin sites reliably dated to 0.9 million years ago. In comparison, the stratigraphic records dating Eurasian sites to greater than 1.1 million years ago were ambiguous and disputed, making associations with climatic events less reliable. The findings are consistent with a rapid migration of hominins and other animals out of Africa around 0.9 million years ago during the first major glaciation of the Pleistocene Epoch, when a drop in sea level opened land routes out of Africa and aridity increased across Africa. According to the authors, the findings suggest that the dispersal of humans out of Africa may have been an adaptive response to a population bottleneck driven by climatic changes around 0.9 million years ago.
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Deployment of piston corer used to recover 16 meter-long, deep-sea sediment cores. Dennis Kent
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Effects of enhanced, cyclical cooling and warming since marine isotope stage 22 shown in open-pit excavation of loess-paleosol sequence in Kostolac, Serbia. Giovanni Muttoni
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Loess section being sampled for integrated stratigraphy in Krakow-Zwierzniec, Poland, with researcher standing on level with evidence of early occupation by H. sapiens. Giovanni Muttoni
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Article Source: PNAS news release
*“Hominin population bottleneck coincided with migration from Africa during the Early Pleistocene ice-age transition,” by Giovanni Muttoni and Dennis V. Kent. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 11-Mar-2024. https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2318903121
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