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Skull offers sign of migration from Africa

STONY BROOK, N.Y., Jan. 11 (UPI) -- A new analysis of a human skull found in South America decades ago showed how relatively recently modern human beings migrated from Africa, scientists said.






In a report in the journal Science, an international research team concluded that the South African skull corroborated archaeological and genetic evidence that humans in modern form originated in sub-Saharan Africa and migrated to populate Europe and Asia, The New York Times said.

The team, headed by Frederick Grine of Stony Brook University in New York, said the age of the South African skull -- which they estimated to be about 36,000 years -- coincided chronologically and closely resembled skulls of humans living in Europe, the eastern parts of Asia and Australia. The inhabitants appeared to have arrived at their new locales with the distinct, unmodified heads of Africans.

The study provides impartial evidence supporting archaeological finds and genetic studies that modern humans left sub-Saharan Africa for Eurasia between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago, scientists said. They migrated to Europe between 45,000 to 35,000 years ago.

Until now paleontologists lacked fossils to test the geneticists' hypothesis that people of sub-Saharan Africa and in Eurasia at that time were on a par.

Copyright 2007 by United Press International