ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2009
Early modern human diversity suggests subdivided population structure and a complex out-of-Africa scenario.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 48 papers.
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48 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bony labyrinth morphology reveals deep population history and isolation among Homo sapiens in prehistoric northeastern Africa (44-3 ka).Nature communications · 2026Article
- A morphological analysis of the modern human frontal bone from Hahnöfersand, Germany.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Regional variability in the Acheulian to Middle Stone Age transition in southern Africa.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Hunter-gatherer genetics research: Importance and avenues.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Anatomically modern human in the Châtelperronian hominin collection from the Grotte du Renne (Arcy-sur-Cure, Northeast France).Scientific reports · 2023Article
- One species, many roots?Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Genomic and demographic processes differentially influence genetic variation across the human X chromosome.PloS one · 2023Article
- Evolution of Homo in the Middle and Late Pleistocene.Journal of human evolution · 2022Review
- Merging morphological and genetic evidence to assess hybridization in Western Eurasian late Pleistocene hominins.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Phylogeography of Sub-Saharan Mitochondrial Lineages Outside Africa Highlights the Roles of the Holocene Climate Changes and the Atlantic Slave Trade.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Global patterns of the cranial form of modern human populations described by analysis of a 3D surface homologous model.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The climate and vegetation backdrop to hominin evolution in Africa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution.Nature geoscience · 2022Article
- Inferring archaic introgression from hominin genetic data.Evolutionary anthropology · 2021Review
- The deep population history in Africa.Human molecular genetics · 2021Review
- Neutral evolution of human enamel-dentine junction morphology.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- The Evolutionary Radiation of Hominids: a Phylogenetic Comparative Study.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Evidence of different climatic adaptation strategies in humans and non-human primates.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- A dispersal of Homo sapiens from southern to eastern Africa immediately preceded the out-of-Africa migration.Scientific reports · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The interpretation of genetic evidence regarding modern human origins depends, among other things, on assessments of the structure and the variation of ancient populations. Because we lack genetic data from the time when the first anatomically modern humans appeared, between 200,000 and 60,000 years ago, instead we exploit the phenotype of neurocranial geometry to compare the variation in early modern human fossils with that in other groups of fossil Homo and recent modern humans. Variation is assessed as the mean-squared Procrustes distance from the group average shape in a representation based on several hundred neurocranial landmarks and semilandmarks. We find that the early modern group has more shape variation than any other group in our sample, which covers 1.8 million years, and that they are morphologically similar to recent modern humans of diverse geographically dispersed populations but not to archaic groups. Of the currently competing models of modern human origins, some are inconsistent with these findings. Rather than a single out-of-Africa dispersal scenario, we suggest that early modern humans were already divided into different populations in Pleistocene Africa, after which there followed a complex migration pattern. Our conclusions bear implications for the inference of ancient human demography from genetic models and emphasize the importance of focusing research on those early modern humans, in particular, in Africa.
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