The virtual skull of the last common ancestor of modern |, Nature-Communication.

Title: Deciphering African late Middle Pleistocene Hominin diversity and the origin of our species
Journal:
Aurélien Mounier, Marta Mirazón Lahr
Published: 10:00
, 2019/09/10:
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A paper published this week in Nature-Newsletter
presents a virtual skull model that may be the last common ancestor of all modern humans.
。the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Aurélien Mounier and Marta Mirazón Lahr studied 263 skulls - representing 21 current human populations and 5 fossil paleoanthrenic populations - and used systematic modeling to reconstruct all modern humans The virtual skulls of the last common ancestor were then compared with five Ancient African fossils from the late Mesodre (about 350,000-130,000 years ago) to assess the role that the populations to which the fossils belonged might have played a role in Homo homovan's origin.authors argue that these genealogies contribute equally to homologous origins. Their findings support the idea that Homo homophones may have co-origined with human populations in southern and eastern Africa, but are unlikely to have originated in northern Africa, as one of the fossils they studied, Irhoud 1, was morphologically closer to Neanderthals.
summary: The origin of Homo sapiens remains a matter of debate. The extent and geographic patterning of morphological diversity among Late Middle Pleistocene (LMP) African hominins is largely unknown, thus precluding the definition of boundaries of variability in early H. sapiens and the interpretation of individual fossils. Here we use a phylogenetic modelling method to predict possible morphologies of a last common ancestor of all modern humans, which we compare to LMP African fossils (KNM-ES 11693, Florisbad, Irhoud 1, Omo II, and LH18). Our results support a complex process for the evolution of H. sapiens, with the recognition of different, geographically localised, populations and lineages in Africa – not all of which contributed to our species’ origin. Based on the available fossils, H. sapiens appears to have originated from the coalescence of South and, possibly, East-African source populations, while North-African fossils may represent a population which introgressed into Neandertals during the LMP.
(Source: Science.com)