May 5, 2024

Revisiting the Out of Africa Theory: New Narrative From Genetic Analysis and AI

The researchers declared that the African characteristics around the time of the Out of Africa expansion are more intricate than previously thought.
The specific relationship between the people who left Africa and the human populations currently occupying the continent is not totally comprehended.
New research on this subject, recently released in the American Journal of Human Genetics, argues that the Out of Africa growth was preceded by a significant population turnover from East to West Africa.

West African migrations. Credit: The graph is made by Saoni Banerji, and the map was downloaded from Wikimedia
Researchers from Estonia and Italy established an ingenious approach by combining neural networks and data. Utilizing this recently established method, they improved the “Out of Africa” situation. The scientists claimed that the African dynamics around the time of the Out of Africa expansion are more complicated than formerly believed.
Archaeologists and geneticists agree that all contemporary human beings stemmed someplace in Africa around 300 thousand years earlier. The population movement that colonized the remainder of the world took place approximately 60-70 thousand years back. Both Y-chromosomal information (which follows patrilineal family tree) and the Mitochondrial genome (which follows the matrilineal line) settle on this. Nevertheless, the exact relationship between the people who left Africa and the human populations presently living in the continent is not totally comprehended.
New research on this topic, just recently published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, argues that the Out of Africa growth was preceded by a considerable population turnover from East to West Africa. This turnover, which may account for up to 90% of the contemporary West African gene pool, increased the affinity between West Africans and Eurasians.

” A similar hypothesis was proposed before for the Y chromosome. This is the very first time we showed it for autosomal DNA,” said Francesco Montinaro, a Lead author in this research study from the University of Bari. Autosomal DNA originates from both parents, instead of Y-chromosome or Mitochondria, which comes just from among our moms and dads.
” It is remarkable to see how our understanding of the human past ends up being ever more complicated and detailed. Our brand-new model can give us an idea why West Africa shows such a young separation time from the out of Africa populations,” stated Vasili Pankratov, a lead co-author from the University of Tartu.
Referral: “Revisiting the out of Africa occasion with a deep-learning technique” by Francesco Montinaro, Vasili Pankratov, Burak Yelmen, Luca Pagani and Mayukh Mondal, 8 October 2021, American Journal of Human Genetics.DOI: 10.1016/ j.ajhg.2021.09.006.