Better explicating the strengths and shortcomings of these models will help refine projections and improve transparency in the years ahead.
Image credit: Witsawat.S.
Edited by Richard G. Klein, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved May 8, 2013 (received for review April 1, 2013)
Abstract
It has been argued recently that the initial dispersal of anatomically modern humans from Africa to southern Asia occurred before the volcanic “supereruption” of the Mount Toba volcano (Sumatra) at ∼74,000 y before present (B.P.)—possibly as early as 120,000 y B.P. We show here that this “pre-Toba” dispersal model is in serious conflict with both the most recent genetic evidence from both Africa and Asia and the archaeological evidence from South Asian sites. We present an alternative model based on a combination of genetic analyses and recent archaeological evidence from South Asia and Africa. These data support a coastally oriented dispersal of modern humans from eastern Africa to southern Asia ∼60–50 thousand years ago (ka). This was associated with distinctively African microlithic and “backed-segment” technologies analogous to the African “Howiesons Poort” and related technologies, together with a range of distinctively “modern” cultural and symbolic features (highly shaped bone tools, personal ornaments, abstract artistic motifs, microblade technology, etc.), similar to those that accompanied the replacement of “archaic” Neanderthal by anatomically modern human populations in other regions of western Eurasia at a broadly similar date.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: pam59{at}cam.ac.uk or m.b.richards{at}hud.ac.uk.
Author contributions: P.M. and M.B.R. designed research; P.M., K.C.G., M.C., P.A.S., and M.B.R. performed research; P.M., K.C.G., M.C., P.A.S., and M.B.R. analyzed data; and P.M. and M.B.R. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1306043110/-/DCSupplemental.
The initial modern human colonization of southern Asia
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