Finding Eden and fighting extinction

This article is from World Archaeology issue 125

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In the complex story of human migration out of Africa, Homo sapiens are believed to have travelled steadily eastwards to Asia – eventually reaching Australia by around 50,000 years ago – but seem not to have moved into Europe for a period of 20,000 years. A new study published in Nature Communications (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46161-7) addresses this crucial period between approximately 70,000 and 45,000 years ago, and reaches the conclusion that early migrants simply stayed put once they found an ideal environment, with no need to keep moving westwards.

A team of geneticists, environmental scientists, and archaeologists reached this conclusion first by using climate and palaeoecological data to look for a region capable of sustaining a large hunter-gatherer population. They decided that the Persian Plateau – an area surrounding modern-day Iran, including parts of Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait – would be the best candidate for this land of plenty.

They then analysed ancient genomes from the region and concluded that present-day Eurasians were largely descended from the people of the Plateau. Lead author Leonardo Vallini, of the University of Padova, Italy, describes the Plateau as the hub from which future populations moved on to settle all of Eurasia.

These findings are based on deductions from genetic and environmental conditions. Researchers now need to find ancient human remains in the area to test the theory. ‘There’s a lot of work yet to do; I hope this paper will help stimulate further investigations in the region’, said co-author, Michael Petraglia, of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University, Brisbane.

These results are consistent with those of another study of ancient genomes published in 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2213061120), which identified an ‘Arabian Standstill’ period, during which the ancestors of all non-African humans underwent genetic adaptation to colder environments, preparing them for the cool Eurasian environments they would eventually encounter. One of the authors of that study, Dr Yassine Souilmi from the University of Adelaide and the Australian National University, described the Persian Plateau population as being ‘at the root of the Eurasian family tree’.

Garden of Eden

Living in their ‘Garden of Eden’, the people of the Persian Plateau probably led happy and contented lives, if another study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2311703121) is to be believed. The authors of the report interviewed 2,966 people in 19 indigenous and small-scale remote communities across the world and found that, despite having very little money, they were on average at least as happy – and in many cases much happier – than people in high-income consumer societies.

Lead author Eric Galbraith, of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, said that ‘many populations with very low monetary incomes report very high average levels of life satisfaction… learning more about what makes life satisfying in these diverse communities might help many others to lead more satisfying lives while addressing the sustainability crisis’.

Four of the small communities (in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and the Western Highlands of Guatemala) reported average happiness scores of more than 8 out of 10, while Finland, deemed the happiest country in the world in OECD research, has an average score of 7.9. In the Western Highlands, where the average annual income is $560 (£450), 30 out of 70 people interviewed gave 10 out of 10 when asked about their life satisfaction. Co-author Victoria Reyes-García said the study showed that ‘wealth – as generated by industrialised economies – is not fundamentally required for humans to lead happy lives’, which is good news for sustainability as it shows that ‘resource-intensive economic growth is not required to achieve high levels of subjective wellbeing’.