Are modern day Ethiopians really genetically original Homo Sapiens or did they migrate from somewhere else?

[The Banker]

I am unsure where to ask this but since the question's events take place hunderds of years back I will ask here. Also the post's title doesn't frame the question properly lol. So here is the exact question down below:

Are 'Ethiopians' really descendants of humans who never left the approximate region of Ethiopia(which is thought to be the birthplace of homo sapiens) or are they some group which migrated to the region later?

Note
1)I know that genetics is not black and white and there is gonna be plenty of foreign DNA in Ethiopians. But I am asking approx
2)I know that humans did not exactly come from the 'the whole Ethiopia' and there was no concept of Ethiopia for most of humans history
3)This question is not meant to be racist or discriminatory

 

[Godot]

Not really, no. "Original humans" didn't just plop down right where they first evolved, and depending who you ask the Rift Valley theory may not even be 100% on the mark (some scientists favor a multi-centered theory of origin).

Generally, the Semitic peoples of Ethiopia (Amharas, for example) are generally traced as coming from North of the region, while Cushitic languages are theorized to come from Northern Nubia. The degree to which certain groups migrated in, or merely blended with already present native inhabitants, is debated.

If you're looking for "O.G. Humans," you're probably angling for the Pygmy/Twa of Central Africa, who're assumed tonhave descended from modern humans who moved into the Congo Basin and beyond.

 

[Superninja76]

Not really, no. "Original humans" didn't just plop down right where they first evolved, and depending who you ask the Rift Valley theory may not even be 100% on the mark (some scientists favor a multi-centered theory of origin).

Generally, the Semitic peoples of Ethiopia (Amharas, for example) are generally traced as coming from North of the region, while Cushitic languages are theorized to come from Northern Nubia. The degree to which certain groups migrated in, or merely blended with already present native inhabitants, is debated.

If you're looking for "O.G. Humans," you're probably angling for the Pygmy/Twa of Central Africa, who're assumed tonhave descended from modern humans who moved into the Congo Basin and beyond.

Hadza are about as close as you're gonna get, I reckon.

 

[Godot]

Hadza are about as close as you're gonna get, I reckon.

Yeah, maybe. Or the San, dunno.

Problem is when considering "natives" of Africa is that it's easy to split hairs on exactly who is native and when they became native, y'know. To the Europeans who rolled in far, far after, the Bantu peoples were native. But to the average Twa, they aren't. Hell, politicians in South Africa regard the Afrikaners as natives white Africans! Maybe this whole concept of natives or national boundaries is all a bit arnitrary?

 

[Migrant_Coconut]

The only clear fact is that the earliest known human fossil was found somewhere in Tanzania, and even then some of us can't agree that we came from Africa.

 

[Umbral]

Well, mostly. Everyone is mixed to a degree. However, there is genetic support for the idea that the population group that expanded/exploded out of Africa also did much the same inside Africa. (Albeit not with the total replacement we saw outside Africa. ) While mixing with the native human and near-human populations. Now this was maybe 70 000 years ago, so there have been a lot of back and forth since then. Both with inter-African population flows and back migration from the geographic area that would become middle East. But they would to a large degree be populations with a large component of the out-of-Africa DNA. Note that they would noe have any greater amount of this DNA than most other populations.

What you are looking for would be the genetic ghost population known as the Basal Eurasians.

We have a lot of fun information in the Ancient and Prehistoric DNA thread, although the fast pace of discoveries in the area mean that som of the earlier posts have been obsoleted a bit. For example the Red Deer Cave people got their DNA sequenced/published last week.

Edit: No they are not a direct line of people who never left, there has been migration there.

 

[xerex]

Posting in the Prehistoric Genetics thread will probably get you more answers.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/ancient-and-prehistoric-human-genetics-thread.381847/

 

[Nik]

Given climate fluctuations made our ancestors migrate to-and-fro, volcanoes zapped regions and ice-ages / inter-glacials alternately exposed / drowned coastal plains / land-bridges, it would be unwise to suppose folk some-where then and now had continuity...

There are some striking exceptions. The Kalahari '!' folk seem to have inhabited that truly ancient desert for a very, very long time. Similarly, the 'coastal' tribes in Australia seem to have an culture going back ~40k years. So, from prior glacial low-stand. IIRC, their song-lines record ancient, drowned trails being re-exposed by our 'recent' ice-age low-stand, new-comers arriving and being directed to vacant areas inland...

 

[Umbral]

Prior to behavioral modernity, populations appear to have been much more stable. Peoples would stay separate or only interact on the fringes for long periods. It is possible that people did not have that level of adaptability that comes with behavioral thing, so a population that was already adapted to somewhere had a much greater advantage. The expansion of Neanderthals/Denisovans appear to have followed this pattern, displacing Erectus-type humans and then settling down to genetic drift.

 

[manitobot]

There was a backdrift population that moved from Asia into the Horn of Africa.

Side note, is there a better forum for these questions to be answered that any of you know of? Always been interested in stuff like this.

 

[Siberian Tiger]

The only clear fact is that the earliest known human fossil was found somewhere in Tanzania, and even then some of us can't agree that we came from Africa.

I thought the consensus was that humanity (Homo sapiens) originated somewhere in Africa.

 

[riggerrob]

According to "The Economist" (July 30m 2022, page 65) the latest skeletal finds at the University of Witwatersrand are a million years older than first thought. These Australopithicus bones were recovered from a cave Sterkfontein, Johannesburg were dated via the new cosmogenic nuclide dating method to 3.7 million years old, more than 1.5 millions older that originally thought.
These finds, plus finds from Star Cave just muddy the waters or human evolution with multiple waves and migrations and die-offs. Multiple humanoid species and tribes occupied any given piece of land multiple times over multiple different centuries. Borders were vague and shifted every few decades or centuries.

 

[Migrant_Coconut]

I thought the consensus was that humanity (Homo sapiens) originated somewhere in Africa.

White supremacists and creationists feel differently.

There’s also a competing theory that we evolved simultaneously from multiple species of H. erectus all over the world at the same time (and somehow, without any genetic drift at all). Sounds a bit like eugenics to me.

 

[UniversalCommons]

People left from Africa and returned to Africa. There were no settlements in the way we think about settlements until the first fishing villages. This was about 10,000 years ago. Fishing villages occurred before agriculture. Before that people moved all over the place. People did not live in a fixed place for long periods of time. The first people were from Africa, but once people got moving, they spread everywhere and returned to the places where they were before.

What these means is that they left Africa adapted to other places and returned to Africa, then left again.

There are a few things to remember until very recently, human beings fought with other human species or competed with other species. It is posited that homo sapiens outcompeted the neanderthals eventually wiping them out. The same is true of every other human species. There were eight species of humans that are known. There is some remnant dna from neanderthals and other human species in some people.

In addition, humans had to compete with much larger predators, megafauna, and things like smilodons and giant wolves and mamoths. It was a more dangerous world. It wasn't until the giant beasts were wiped out and the other human species were driven to extinction that people could settle down.

 

[cerebus]

There is no such thing as genetically original humans. All humans alive today have experienced between 1/2 and 3/4 million years of evolution since the first group of homo sap. We are all equally different from them. Humans certainly evolved in Subsaharan Africa since there is far greater variation there than the rest of the world suggesting migration from Africa not to Africa. But that does not make any Africans more original than anybody else. As for trying to find people who have not moved for 600,000 years!
All I can say is that people have always moved and genes have always mixed and after so long there will be no evidence.

 

[Umbral]

I thought the consensus was that humanity (Homo sapiens) originated somewhere in Africa.

With all the new information we are getting, human development is starting to look more like a thorny bush than a straight line. Seems like most of it happened in Africa, but we yoinked shiny or useful genes from other places.

 

[Minchandre]

I thought the consensus was that humanity (Homo sapiens) originated somewhere in Africa.

The "Out of Africa" theory is accepted by 99% of scientists as the origin of what are called "anatomically modern humans" (AMH) (Homo sapiens sapiens).

However, there is a bit of complication: remains of Neanderthals and Denisovans have been found outside of Africa, and dated to before AMH are thought to have left Africa. There are, however, two places for wiggle room here: the first is that the dating isn't considered to be 100% reliable, especially for some of the older Neanderthal remains, and the second is that people have fist fights about whether Neanderthals and Denisovans count as human (okay, not fist fights, but fierce academic debate). Since we know that there were "pre-human" hominids outside of Africa before AMHs left, we now have to ask whether Neanderthals and Denisovans evolved also in Africa before striking out (possibly before AMHs), or whether they evolved from a population of hominids that never entered Africa as part of the wave that would end with AMH.

 

[Jürgen]

People of the Horn of Africa are descendent of the same population as the Out of Africa population descend from, as such they’re closer related to Norwegian, Japanese and Aboriginals than they are to neighboring Kenyans. From what I understand humanity can be split up in three groups.

People with very little genetic diversity: Everyone outside Africa, North Africans and people of the Horn of Africa.

People with little genetic diversity: Most Subsaharan Africans.

People with moderate genetic diversity: Khoisan and African Pygmies.

The latter group is lump together of unrelated African populations who have seen a far smaller genetic bottleneck than the former two groups, when we talk about the near extinction of humanity 70.000 years ago, we’re primarily speaking of the first group as it was obvious the first group whose genes was sampled, in reality humanity was not close to going extinct, there were just several distinct population who saw separate population collapses at the same time with the ancestral population of the Out of Africa group seeing one of the worst ones. The modern human population in the Middle East likely ended up going extinct only leaving genetic traces in the local Neanderthal population and likely giving the Out of Africa group a opportunity for expansion. Maybe the Ethiopian highlands served to give the Out of Africa population better adaption to the colder climate outside SSA and with the disappearance of the Middle Eastern modern humans, they had suddenly opportunity to expand.

 

[summerking422]

People of the Horn of Africa are descendent of the same population as the Out of Africa population descend from, as such they’re closer related to Norwegian, Japanese and Aboriginals than they are to neighboring Kenyans. From what I understand humanity can be split up in three groups.

People with very little genetic diversity: Everyone outside Africa, North Africans and people of the Horn of Africa.

People with little genetic diversity: Most Subsaharan Africans.

People with moderate genetic diversity: Khoisan and African Pygmies.

The latter group is lump together of unrelated African populations who have seen a far smaller genetic bottleneck than the former two groups, when we talk about the near extinction of humanity 70.000 years ago, we’re primarily speaking of the first group as it was obvious the first group whose genes was sampled, in reality humanity was not close to going extinct, there were just several distinct population who saw separate population collapses at the same time with the ancestral population of the Out of Africa group seeing one of the worst ones. The modern human population in the Middle East likely ended up going extinct only leaving genetic traces in the local Neanderthal population and likely giving the Out of Africa group a opportunity for expansion. Maybe the Ethiopian highlands served to give the Out of Africa population better adaption to the colder climate outside SSA and with the disappearance of the Middle Eastern modern humans, they had suddenly opportunity to expand.

Ummmm Horn Africans are more related to Japanese people? I highly doubt that. Chadic peoples are more related to Norwegians.