New UC Davis Research Using DNA Changes Origin of Human Species

This article originally appeared on the College of Biological Sciences News.

In testing the genetic material of current populations in Africa and comparing it against existing fossil evidence of early Homo sapiens populations there, researchers have uncovered a new model of human evolution — overturning previous beliefs that a single African population gave rise to all humans. The new research was published today, May 17, in the journal Nature.

Although it is widely understood that Homo sapiens originated in Africa, uncertainty surrounds how branches of human evolution diverged and how people migrated across the continent, said Brenna Henn, professor of anthropology and the Genome Center at UC Davis, corresponding author of the research.

“This uncertainty is due to limited fossil and ancient genomic data, and to the fact that the fossil record does not always align with expectations from models built using modern DNA,” she said. “This new research changes the origin of species.”

Research co-led by Henn and Simon Gravel of McGill University tested a range of competing models of evolution and migration across Africa proposed in the paleoanthropological and genetics literature, incorporating population genome data from southern, eastern and western Africa.

The authors included newly sequenced genomes from 44 modern Nama individuals from southern Africa, an Indigenous population known to carry exceptional levels of genetic diversity compared to other modern groups. Researchers generated genetic data by collecting saliva samples from modern individuals going about their everyday business in their villages between 2012 and 2015.

Read the full article here.