The Human Journey
Before Ust’-Ishim man, the oldest human genome to have been mapped belonged to a 24,000-year-old boy, whose bones were also discovered in Siberia. The DNA from Mal’ta boy, as he is called, demonstrated an ancestral link between Europeans and Native Americans.
Like the Mal’ta boy, Ust’-Ishim man helps us more fully retell the story of the nomads of our species who left Africa and migrated across the globe. The full details remain clouded, but the outlines of a narrative are there.
Source: The Evening Standard
It appears that about 60,000 years ago a wave of Homo sapiens traveled from the Horn of Africa into the Middle East. Some continued northward to Siberia. Eventually some of our species spread west to Europe as well as east, likely along the coast of the Indian Ocean, all the way to Indonesia and Australia. Later, sometime between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, others crossed an ice-bridge from Asia to Alaska and began populating the Americas.
Ust’Ishim man offers the title, if not all of the details, of another chapter in this story. At some point between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, Homo sapiens encountered and mated with Neanderthals. Millennia later, the Neanderthal line would mysteriously fizzle out. But Homo sapiens, many of us still carrying the DNA traces from our species’ dalliance with Neanderthals, would continue to flourish and populate the earth.
