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The continent of Africa, which currently encompasses about one third of all existing ethnicities worldwide, is fascinating because it is not only the most likely homeland of the genus Homo, but also of modern humans (our species Homo sapiens).

For this reason, it meets the interests of most researchers in anthropology, including palaeontologists, archaeologists, geneticists and scholars of many other related disciplines (e.g. ethnology, historical linguistics, and so on). In all these diverse fields, recent discoveries and results have challenged current hypotheses on the peopling history of this continent.

First, very old fossils attributed to modern humans have been found in the Moroccan archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud, dating back to the emergence of our species from 200,000 to about 300,000 years ago and extending the putative origin of Homo sapiens from East to North-West Africa. This finding appears to be compatible with the age estimated for a very old modern human bone recently found outside Africa in the Near East, which suggests more ancient dispersals from Africa than previously thought, in better agreement with palaeoclimatic data.

Researchers now also debate on alternative locations for our origins based on genetic data; besides East Africa, a great attention is paid to South Africa where the analyses of ancient genomes indicate a possible divergence of the first modern human populations more than 250,000 years ago. Besides its role as a putative homeland of modern humans, Africa has also been the scene of multiple migrations resulting in remarkable population diversity, today represented by more than 2,000 population groups who follow distinct lifestyles and who speak different languages belonging to four separate linguistic phyla.

Extensive genomic studies have considerably enlightened our understanding of the great genetic variation observed in Africa, which was likely shaped by multiple factors such as geographic dispersals linked to climatic changes, environmental adaptations associated with diseases, cultural adaptations and many others.

Further infos: Conference Peopling History of Africa