Out of Africa

The NY Times has a piece on a fossil human cranium found in South Africa that seems to confirm DNA evidence about the initial spread of modern humans out of Africa into Eurasia and later Europe. Roughly 50,000 years ago, DNA evidence (a good run-down of this is in Before the Dawn) indicates that a small group of modern humans (perhaps as few as 150 individuals) crossed the Red Sea and migrated through the Arabian peninsula to eventually populate the rest of the world.

We know what these people looked like from remains found in Eurasia and Europe, but up until this find there has been a problem. From the article:

"Until now, however, paleontologists had been frustrated by the absence of fossils to test the hypothesis of most geneticists that the people of sub-Saharan Africa and in Eurasia at that time were one and the same — modern humans. The human fossil record in Africa from 70,000 to 15,000 years ago had been virtually blank."

Some scientists, on the other hand, have contended that the migration could have begun as early as 100,000 years ago and that in the intervening time, contact with more archaic populations like the Neanderthals could have produced recognizable changes in what became the modern humans of Eurasia."

This find shows that people living in sub-Saharan Africa looked much the same as those in Eurasia, bolstering the DNA evidence for a single late migration.