The archaeological record of Paleolithic Europe leaves many open questions regarding the nature of the arrival of modern humans into the region and the nature of how these newcomers interacted with the resident Neanderthal populations. In this study, Slimak compared records of stone tool technology across western Eurasia to document the sequence of early human activity in the region.
This study primarily focused on
comparative analysis of tens of thousands of
stone tools from two sites: Ksar Akil in Lebanon and Grotte Mandrin in France, that recently revealed the earliest Homo sapiens migration in Europe dating to 54,000 years old. The study analyzed their precise technical connections with the earliest modern technologies in the continent. The author identifies a similar sequence of three technological phases in both regions, suggesting three distinct waves of migration of Homo sapiens across Europe.
The paper provides evidence for three distinct waves of early migration of Sapiens in Europe from the East Mediterranean coast. The image shows three technical traditions of each of these Sapiens migrations. Phase 1, around the 54th millennium, is represented by the Neronian/Initial Upper Paleolithic; phase 2 by the Châtelperronian/Early Upper Paleolithic around the 45th millennium, and phase 3 by the Protoaurignacian/Southern Early Ahmarian around the 42nd millennium. Credit: Ludovic Slimak, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
These trans-Mediterranean technological connections allow for a reinterpretation of the pattern of human arrival in Europe and its precise relations with the Levantine region. Further examination of these apparent phases of human migration will establish a clearer picture of the sequence of events as Homo sapiens spread across the region and, in doing so, gradually replaced Neanderthals.
Slimak adds, "Until 2022, it was believed that Homo sapiens had reached Europe between the 42nd and 45th millennium. The study shows that this first sapiens migration would actually be the last of three major migratory
waves to the continent, profoundly rewriting what was thought to be known about the origin of sapiens in Europe. Chatelperronian culture, one of the first modern traditions in western Europe and since then attributed to Neanderthals, should in fact signal the second wave of Homo sapiens
migration in Europe, impacting deeply our understanding of the cultural organization of the last Neanderthals."
See:
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-stone-tools-migration-earliest-homo.html
See:
https://popular-archaeology.com/art...igration-of-the-earliest-sapiens-into-europe/
Nature
Late Pleistocene climate drivers of early human migration
On the basis of fossil and archaeological data it has been hypothesized that the exodus of
Homo sapiens out of Africa and into Eurasia between ~50–120 thousand years ago occurred in several orbitally paced migration episodes
1,
2,
3,
4. Crossing vegetated pluvial corridors from northeastern Africa into the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant and expanding further into Eurasia, Australia and the Americas, early
H. sapiens experienced massive time-varying climate and sea level conditions on a variety of timescales. Hitherto it has remained difficult to quantify the effect of glacial- and millennial-scale climate variability on early human dispersal and evolution. Here we present results from a numerical human dispersal model, which is forced by spatiotemporal estimates of climate and sea level changes over the past 125 thousand years. The model simulates the overall dispersal of
H. sapiens in close agreement with archaeological and fossil data and features prominent glacial migration waves across the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant region around 106–94, 89–73, 59–47 and 45–29 thousand years ago. The findings document that orbital-scale global climate swings played a key role in shaping Late Pleistocene global population distributions, whereas millennial-scale abrupt climate changes, associated with Dansgaard–Oeschger events, had a more limited regional effect.
See:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19365#auth-Axel-Timmermann-Aff1-Aff2
Ancient Genomes Point to Three Waves of Human Migration Into Southeast Asia
May 17, 2018 |
staff reporter
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – According to a new analysis of ancient genomes from Southeast Asia, three waves of human migration produced the genetic landscape of the region.
While the humid environment there has made it difficult to analyze ancient DNA, an international team of researchers was able to isolate and analyze the genomes of 18 individuals dating back between 1,700 years and 4,100 years ago from what is now Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia.
As they
reported today in Science, the researchers found that hunter-gatherers first arrived in Southeast Asia about 45,000 years ago, and farmers from China arrived during the Neolithic Period about 4,500 years ago, followed by Bronze Age migrations from China about 3,000 years ago. This, the researchers noted, mirrors migrations in Europe.
"A very important part of the world is now accessible for ancient DNA analysis," first author and Harvard Medical School postdoctoral fellow Mark Lipson said in a statement. "It opens a window into the genetic origins of the people who lived there in the past and those who live there now."
He and his colleagues analyzed samples obtained from five sites in Southeast Asia: a Neolithic sample from Man Bac in Vietnam, a Bronze Age sample from Nui Nap in Vietnam, a Late Neolithic/Bronze Age sample from Oakaie in Myanmar, a Late Neolithic sample from Ban Chiang in Thailand, and an Iron Age sample from Vat Komnou in Cambodia. In all, they screened 350 next-generation sequencing libraries generated from bone samples from 146 different individuals.
In an initial principal components analysis, the researches compared their samples to set of diverse modern-day non-Africans and found that most of the ancient samples clustered with present-day Chinese and Vietnamese individuals. A few of the samples, the researchers noted, skewed slightly more toward Papuans and to the Onge people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
When they then compared the ancient individuals to only modern Southeast Asian individuals, they found that the Man Bac, Ban Chiang, and Vat Komnou samples clustered most closely with modern-day Austroasiatic speakers, while the Nui Nap samples fell closer to modern Vietnamese and Dai individuals, and the Oakaie samples grouped near modern Myanmar and Sino-Tibetan speakers' samples.
Similarly, outgroup f3-statistic analyses found the Man Bac, Ban Chiang, and Vat Komnou shared the most alleles with modern Austroasiatic speakers, while the Nui Nap shared the most alleles with Austronesian speakers like the Dai and Kinh and the Oakaie with Sino-Tibetan speakers.
Lipson and his colleagues then constructed admixture graph models to test the relationships between their ancient samples and modern-day groups. Through this, they found the ancient Man Bac and present-day Nicobarese and Mlabri have ancestry stemming from a Southeast Asian farmer-related source as well as from a deeply diverging eastern Eurasian source. A model of these ancestry events suggested it involved a shared ancestral admixture event, followed by the divergence of the Man Bac from present-day Austroasiatic speakers, and a wave of deep ancestry into the Nicobarese.
Similarly, they found western Indonesians had ancestry stemming from Austronesian-, Austroasiatic-, and Papuan-related sources, while the Juang of eastern India had ancestry from a western Eurasian, deep eastern Eurasian, and Austroasiatic clades*.
From this, the researchers pieced together a scenario in which early Austroasiatic-speaking migrants from southern China brought farming to mainland Southeast Asia during the Neolithic where they mixed with local hunter-gatherers. Then, during the Bronze Age, another wave of migrants arrived in Myanmar from China about 3,000 years ago, reaching Vietnam about 2,000 years ago and Thailand about 1,000 years ago.
This pattern of genetic changes accompanying cultural shifts resembles what has
reported to have occurred in Europe, the researchers noted, with one exception: Ancestral diversity in Europe has been lost over time, while it remains in Southeast Asia.
"People who are nearly direct descendants of each of the three source populations are still living in the region today, including people with significant hunter-gatherer ancestry who live in Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the Andaman Islands," Harvard's David Reich, a co-senior author of the paper, added. "Whereas in Europe, no one living today has more than a small fraction of ancestry from the European hunter-gatherers."
* clade -
- A grouping of organisms made on the basis of their presumed evolutionary history, consisting of a common ancestor and all of its descendants.
- A group of animals or other organisms derived from a common ancestor species.
- A higher level grouping of a genetic haplogroup.
See:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=clade+definition&ia=web
The European continent was subject to three major migrations of peoples during the Holocene: the northwestward movement of Anatolian farmer populations during the Neolithic and the westward movement of Yamnaya steppe peoples during the Bronze Age. These movements changed the genetic composition of the continent’s inhabitants. The Holocene was also characterized by major changes in vegetation composition, which altered the environment occupied by the original hunter-gatherer populations.
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