Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies

Aboriginal hair from Cambridge’s Duckworth Collection reveals history of human dispersals.

In a major scientific breakthrough, scientists throw new light onto a long-standing problem in recent human evolution - how many major waves of migration were involved in the first colonization of the world by early modern humans. In a new paper published in Science today, Eske Willerslev from Copenhagen, together with a large international collaborative team, explore the secrets of an ancient Australian genome to show that all the world’s people outside Africa today descend from two separate waves of dispersal – an early one that led to the colonization of Australia, and a later one from which most Eurasian populations today derive. Such a theory had been proposed before by Lahr & Foley, co-authors in the Science study, as well as other scientists like Stringer, Kingdom and Cavalli-Sforza, but this is the first strong genetic evidence in its favour.

Anthropologists in the early 20th century were great collectors, travelling the world to discover the extraordinary diversity of humanity. Among the more esoteric items they brought back were locks of hair. Hairs – which we know varies between peoples of the world – were seen as biological markers, and were much studied. However, scientific techniques and questions moved on, and the hair samples often lay forgotten in the collections. Now techniques have changed again, and the hair samples have come back into their own.

In a paper published in Science (23.9.2011), a team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, used a hair donated to Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon in the1920s while travelling in Australia, to reveal Australian aboriginal history and origins, through the extraction of DNA (links). The lock of hair had been part of the Duckworth Collection since Haddon’s return from his travels.

“It was a very exciting collaboration”, says Dr Marta Mirazon Lahr, the Director of the Duckworth Collection, who suggested the sample for study. “Not only was it a great technical challenge for Eske, Mortem and the team they brought together, it was also a phenomenal piece of international and inter-disciplinary teamwork, with emails buzzing around the world, trying to piece together an interpretation of the complex history of people, using genetic, fossil and archaeological evidence.”

The main result shows that Australian aborigines are descendants of the very earliest migrations out of Africa by modern humans – and so have one of the longest and most continuous demographic histories in the world – and that the well-known ‘out of Africa’ story of human origins is more complicated as suggested by several researchers nearly 20 years ago. Rather than a single dispersal, as many argued on the basis of the mitochondrial DNA evidence, instead there were at least two – one giving rise to Australians and another for Eurasians more generally.

“This is full circle”, says Professor Robert Foley, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies where the Duckworth Laboratory is based. “”In 1994, Marta Mirazon Lahr and I proposed that there were multiple dispersals from Africa, as that seemed the only way to explain the archaeological and anthropological evidence, but later genetic evidence was against it. Now a sample from the Cambridge collection which we had all the time has provided the genomic evidence for these dispersals.”

Lahr, M. M. and Foley, R. (1994), Multiple dispersals and modern human origins. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 3: 48–60. doi: 10.1002/evan.1360030206

Aboriginal Genome Shows Two-Wave Settlement of Asia [Science]

Aboriginal Australians were first explorers [ Research News - University of Cambridge]