Major expansion in the human niche preceded out of Africa dispersal
Hallett, Emily Y Cerasoni, Jacopo Niccolò Will, Manuel Beyer, Robert Krapp, Mario Kandel, Andrew W Manica, Andrea Scerri, Eleanor ML
Hallett, Emily Y
Cerasoni, Jacopo Niccolò
Will, Manuel
Beyer, Robert
Krapp, Mario
Kandel, Andrew W
Manica, Andrea
Scerri, Eleanor ML
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2025-06-18
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2021-11-19
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archaeology
ecological modelling
evolutionary ecology
ecological modelling
evolutionary ecology
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Abstract
All contemporary Eurasians trace most of their ancestry to a small population that dispersed out of Africa about 50,000 years ago (ka)<jats:sup>1–9</jats:sup>. By contrast, fossil evidence attests to earlier migrations out of Africa<jats:sup>10–15</jats:sup>. These lines of evidence can only be reconciled if early dispersals made little to no genetic contribution to the later, major wave. A key question therefore concerns what factors facilitated the successful later dispersal that led to long-term settlement beyond Africa. Here we show that a notable expansion in human niche breadth within Africa precedes this later dispersal. We assembled a pan-African database of chronometrically dated archaeological sites and used species distribution models (SDMs) to quantify changes in the bioclimatic niche over the past 120,000 years. We found that the human niche began to expand substantially from 70 ka and that this expansion was driven by humans increasing their use of diverse habitat types, from forests to arid deserts. Thus, humans dispersing out of Africa after 50 ka were equipped with a distinctive ecological flexibility among hominins as they encountered climatically challenging habitats, providing a key mechanism for their adaptive success.
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Hallett, E.Y., Leonardi, M., Cerasoni, J.N. et al. Major expansion in the human niche preceded out of Africa dispersal. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09154-0
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The linked file is the published version of the article.
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0028-0836
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1476-4687
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openAccess