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Beyond multiregional and simple out-of-Africa models of human evolution

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 3, pages 1370–1372 (2019)Cite this article

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The past half century has seen a move from a multiregionalist view of human origins to widespread acceptance that modern humans emerged in Africa. Here the authors argue that a simple out-of-Africa model is also outdated, and that the current state of the evidence favours a structured African metapopulation model of human origins.

For decades, polarized debates about human origins have swung between two major models. Classic multiregionalism viewed the majority of our ancestry as being spread across the Old World over the past one to two million years, and emphasized regional continuity. The recent and simple out-of-Africa (SOA) model proposed an expansion out of Africa in the past 100,000 yr from a single region in Africa. Testing these models has undoubtedly improved our understanding of recent human origins, but with ever-richer archaeological, anthropological, genetic and palaeoecological data available, are they still useful? We argue that these formulations now constrain progress in human evolutionary studies and call for a shift to structured metapopulation models.

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Fig. 1: Cartogram with resized land area representing modern human genetic diversity and colour representing Neanderthal plus Denisovan ancestry.

James Cheshire and Mark G. Thomas

Fig. 2: Different models of population history.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Cheshire for generating Fig. 1, and M. O’Reilly and C. Pantiru for Fig. 2 design. We also thank C. Stringer and H. Groucutt for comments on the manuscript. E.M.L.S.’s work was supported by a Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions Fellowship and the Max Planck Society. M.G.T. is supported by a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship (grant 100719/Z/12/Z, ‘Human adaptation to changing diet and infectious disease loads, from the origins of agriculture to the present’). L.C. is supported by the French Laboratory of Excellence project ‘TULIP’ of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-10-LABX-41; ANR-11-IDEX-0002-02), the LIA BEEG-B (Laboratoire International Associé—Bioinformatics, Ecology, Evolution, Genomics and Behaviour) between the CNRS and Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, the ANR Investissement d’Avenir grant (CEBA: ANR-10-LABX-25-01) and the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) through the INFRAGECO and DISPO projects (Biodiversa/0003/2015 and PTDC-BIA-EVL/30815/2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pan African Evolution Research Group, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany

    Eleanor M. L. Scerri

  2. Laboratoire Évolution et Diversité Biologique (EDB UMR 5174), Université de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées, CNRS, IRD, UPS, Toulouse, France

    Lounès Chikhi

  3. Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Oeiras, Portugal

    Lounès Chikhi

  4. Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, London, UK

    Mark G. Thomas

  5. UCL Genetics Institute, University College London, London, UK

    Mark G. Thomas

Authors
  1. Eleanor M. L. Scerri
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Correspondence to Eleanor M. L. Scerri.

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Scerri, E.M.L., Chikhi, L. & Thomas, M.G. Beyond multiregional and simple out-of-Africa models of human evolution. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 1370–1372 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0992-1

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