PARIS: New research published on Friday backs the theory that modern humans spread out of Africa relatively recently, around 50,000 years ago, on the first step of our species’ conquest of the planet.

The “Out of Africa” scenario is well known but only a few hominid fossils or artefacts have emerged to explain when the great trek began and how humans dispersed.

A find in Russia, though, and a fresh look at a skull discovered in South Africa more than half a century ago, offer new clues, scientists say.

An international research team, delving into a site of ancient volcanic ash on the River Don around 400 kilometres south of Moscow, found teeth, stone and ivory tools that suggest Homo sapiens moved there some 45,000 to 42,000 years ago.

The finds at Kostenki include perforated shell ornaments that can be traced to the Black Sea more than 500 km away, and a carved piece of mammoth ivory that appears to represent a small human figurine.

If so, it could represent the earliest piece of figurative art in the world.

The stones used to make these artefacts were imported from sites between 100 and 180 km away.

“The big surprise here is the very early presence of modern humans in one of the coldest, driest places in Europe,” co-researcher John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado at Boulder, told US journal Science, where the paper was published.

“It is one of the last places we would have expected people from Africa to occupy first.” Another paper, also appearing in Science, recounts how scientists used high-tech optical scanning and uranium dating methods to reassess a skull found in 1952 near Hofmeyr, South Africa.

The fossil is calculated to be 36,000 years old, plus or minus 3,300 years, making its original owner a near-contemporary of the Kostenki people.

Some of the skulls features are “archaic”, meaning that they are consistent with the crania of Eurasians from the Upper Palaeolithic era rather than of humans today.

The Upper Palaeolithic, also called the Old Stone Age, ran from around 40,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. It is considered a key period in the human odyssey, coinciding with the emergence of new stone tools, weapons and cave paintings.—AFP