Malaria shaped early human survival, steering where populations lived across Africa 74,000 years ago.
For generations, scientists believed humanity had a single birthplace somewhere on the African continent. That view has been steadily overturned, with mounting evidence now suggesting our species arose from multiple populations living in different regions of Africa and interacting over thousands of years.
But what kept those populations apart — or drew them together — has remained an open question. Climate, researchers long assumed, was the primary answer. A bold new study says otherwise.
Malaria May Have Shaped Early Human Survival and Migration
Published this week in Science Advances, the research by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, the University of Cambridge, and fellow researchers proposes that malaria — specifically the lethal Plasmodium falciparum strain — was a decisive force in shaping where early humans could and could not survive. ()
Examining the critical period between 74,000 and 5,000 years ago, before humanity fanned out across the globe and before farming reshaped disease transmission patterns, the team found that the ancient threat of malaria may have quietly steered the course of human history.
The study shows that malaria, one of humanity’s oldest and most persistent pathogens, influenced habitat choice by pushing human groups away from high-risk environments and separating populations across the landscape.
Over tens of thousands of years, this fragmentation shaped how populations met, mixed, and exchanged genes, helping create the population structure seen in humans today. The findings suggest that infectious disease was not simply a challenge early humans faced: it was a fundamental factor shaping the deep history of our species.
“We used species distribution models of three major mosquito complexes together with palaeoclimate models,” explains lead author Dr Margherita Colucci of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Cambridge. “Combining these with epidemiological data allowed us to estimate malaria transmission risk across sub-Saharan Africa.”
Early Humans Avoided High-Malaria Regions
The researchers then compared these estimates with an independent reconstruction of the human ecological niche across the same region and time period. The results show that humans strongly avoided, or were unable to persist, in areas with high malaria transmission risk.
“The effects of these choices shaped human demography for the last 74,000 years, and likely much earlier,” says Professor Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge, one of the senior authors of the study. “By fragmenting human societies across the landscape, malaria contributed to the population structure we see today. Climate and physical barriers were not the only forces shaping where human populations could live.”
“This study opens up new frontiers in research on human evolution,” adds Professor Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, also senior author of the study.
“Disease has rarely been considered a major factor shaping the earliest prehistory of our species, and without ancient DNA from these periods it has been difficult to test. Our research changes that narrative and provides a new framework for exploring the role of disease in deep human history.”
References:
- Malaria shaped human spatial organization for the past 74 thousand years – (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aea2316)
Source-Eurekalert