Into Africa: Ancient skeleton sheds light on reverse migration

“About the origins of modern man, the finding doesn’t say much, as we are talking about a migration in the last 4,000 years”. Because it was widely suspected that the heat and humidity in the tropics would destroy genetic material, many scientists flocked to places like Siberia to search for ancient DNA. The petrous bone is a thick part of the temporal bone at the base of the skull, just behind the ear. Such a Stone Age resettlement had previously been theorized, but the rare find allowed scientists to see what DNA looked like well before the time the migration would have taken place.

Scientists have found a complete assemblage of DNA from an ancient human in Africa for the first time.

Even in the Congo, for example, the Mbuti people now show as much as 6 percent of their genome being West Eurasian, according to the study, Smithsonian reports.

By looking at the disparity, they established that it comes from modern Sardinians and a prehistoric farmer who lived in Germany.

Most anthropologists think that man originated in Africa. They brought crops new to Africa, such as wheat and barley. Mota lived in Africa before this second, backwards migration. Today, those ancient farmers’ closest genetic relatives are found on the island of Sardinia.

Events like the backflow migration, along with later population movements around Africa, scrambled genetics across the continent. The other was for members of the so-called LBK culture in Germany, early farmers who lived about 7,000 years ago.

Dr. Arthur suggests a prolonged period of “interaction between Africans, Europeans, and Eurasians”. The scale of the migration proved to have been larger than previously thought but it remains to be established how it happened. Moto man, on the other hand, had entirely African DNA.

However, during the 1990s scientists began to retrieve a few pieces of DNA and were piecing them together to form longer segments.

The authors of the study have no idea what caused such a massive migration.

The team found that Mota’s DNA was most similar to that of the modern Ari people, who live in the Ethiopian highlands.

Discovery of the remains, named Bayira, or “first born” in the local Gamo language, was an unexpected byproduct of work the two were undertaking to understand the Gamo’s strict, caste-like social structure and how it developed over time. The samples of ancient DNA that have been sequenced to date were extracted from bodies in Europe and Asia that were naturally refrigerated in cooler climates.

Africa is considered to be the cradle of humanity and the staging ground for humans migrations around the world. Yet until now, there has been precious little genetic information on ancient humans available from the continent, especially when compared with ancient humans across the Eurasian continent. A team led by Joseph Pickrell at the Harvard Medical School’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute analyzed genetic-mixing “events” among groups in southern and eastern Africa. The cave is situated nearly 2,000 meters above sea level in southwestern Ethiopia.