Study points to larger role of Asian ancestors in evolution

A new analysis of the dental fossils of human ancestors suggests that Asian populations played a larger role than Africans in colonizing Europe millions of years ago, said a study released Monday.

The findings challenge the prevailing"Out of Africa" theory, which holds that anatomically modern man first arose from one point in Africa and fanned out to conquer the globe, and bolsters the notion that Homo sapiens evolved from different populations in different parts of the globe.

The"Out of Africa" scenario has been underpinned since 1987 by genetic studies based mainly on the rate of mutations in mitochondrial DNA, a cell material inherited from the maternal line of ancestry....

The paper was written by researchers at Spain's national center for research into human evolution in Burgos and appears in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.