Scientists solve a missing 20,000-year gap in human history after uncovering a ‘hub’ where the first humans lived after emerging from Africa

Scientists claim to have filled a missing gap in human history by discovering where Homo sapiens, who left Africa, spent 20,000 years before settling in Eurasia.

It has long been known that our ancestors left the continent about 70,000 years ago and spread across Asia and Europe 45,000 years ago, but where they spent the intervening time has long been a mystery.

A team of international studies determined that about a thousand of these travelers lived in an area spanning the Middle East known as the Persian Plateau.

This realization was made using ancient DNA, modern gene pools, and paleoecological evidence showing that this region would have represented an ideal habitat before they continued to settle in Asia and Europe.

Luca Pagani of the University of Padova in Italy, senior author of the study, said: ‘Our results provide the first complete picture of the whereabouts of the ancestors of all contemporary non-Africans in the early phases of the colonization of Eurasia.’

The team analyzed ancient genomes from west-central Eurasia and China and found that the ancestors of today’s Eurasians emerged from the hub 45,000 years ago and colonized most of Eurasia and Oceania.

Simulations were then made to look back in time at the landscape and climate of the Persian plateau, showing that it was higher at the time Homo sapiens arrived.

According to researchers, this gave our ancestors an advantage over surrounding areas.

“In addition, the presence of a viable area located on both shores of the Red Sea and extending across the Mediterranean Sea appears to provide suitable habitat,” said the study published in Nature.

The people living in the center at the time had dark skin and hair, perhaps resembling the Gumuz or Anuak people now living in parts of East Africa (stock)

These people lived in small, mobile groups of hunter-gatherers, the researchers said. The hub site offered a variety of ecological environments, from forests to grasslands and savannas, that fluctuated between dry and wet intervals over time.

Sufficient resources would have been available, with evidence showing hunting of wild gazelles, sheep and goats, said co-author Michael Petraglia of Australia’s Griffith University.

“Their diet would have consisted of edible plants and game from small to large sizes,” he continued.

Hunter-gatherer groups seemed to have practiced a seasonal lifestyle; they lived in the lowlands in the colder months and in the mountainous areas in the warmer months.’

The people living in the center at the time had dark skin and hair, perhaps resembling the Gumuz or Anuak people now living in parts of East Africa.

“Cave art appeared simultaneously as soon as people left the hub. So these cultural achievements could have been brewed while in the hub,” Pagani said.

However, no fossilized remains of Homo sapiens have been found on the Persian PLAtea, but have been found in Arabia and the Levant. This group would be direct descendants of those from the hub, the study claimed.

Homo sapiens was not the first human species to live outside Africa, including the area around the Hub. Ancient interbreeding between our species left a small Neanderthal contribution to the DNA of modern non-Africans.

“Neanderthals have been found in the area since before the arrival of Homo sapiens, so it could well be that the junction was where that interaction took place,” says Vallini.