Scientists solve 20,000-year missing gap in human history after uncovering 'hub' where first humans lived after emerging from Africa

Scientists claim to have filled in a missing gap in human history by discovering where Homo sapiens who walked out of Africa spent 20,000 years before settling in Eurasia.

It has long been known that our ancient ancestors left the continent around 70,000 years ago and spread throughout Asia and Europe 45,000 years ago, but where they spent the time in between has long been a mystery.

A team of international researches determined that about a thousand of these travelers lived in an area that spanned the Middle East, known as the Persian Plateau.

The realization was made using ancient DNA, modern gene pools and paleoecological evidence showing that this region would have represented an ideal habitat before they continued to settle in Asia and Europe.

A team of international researches determined that about a thousand of these travelers lived in an area that spanned the Middle East, known as the Persian Plateau

Luca Pagani of the University of Padova in Italy, senior author of the study said: 'Our results provide the first full picture of the whereabouts of the ancestors of all present-day non-Africans in the early phases of the colonization of Eurasia.'

The team analyzed ancient genomes from West Central Eurasia and China, finding that the ancestors of present-day Eurasians emerged from the hub 45,000 years ago and colonized most of Eurasia and Oceania.

Simulations were then created to look back in time to the landscape and climate of the Persian Plateau, revealing it was higher during the time Homo sapiens arrived.

This, according to researchers, gave our ancestors an advantage over surrounding areas.

'Furthermore, the presence of a viable area located on both shores of the Red Sea and stretching across the Mediterranean Sea would seem to offer a suitable habitat,' reads the study published in Nature.

The people inhabiting the hub at the time had dark skin and dark hair, perhaps resembling the Gumuz or Anuak people now living in parts of East Africa (stock)

These people lived in small, mobile bands of hunter-gatherers, the researchers said. The hub location offered a variety of ecological settings, from forests to grasslands and savannahs, fluctuating over time between arid and wet intervals.

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There would have been ample resources available, with evidence showing the hunting of wild gazelle, sheep and goat, study co-author Michael Petraglia with Australia's Griffith University said.

'Their diet would have been composed of edible plants and small- to large-sized game,' he continued.

Hunter-gatherer groups seemed to have practiced a seasonal lifestyle, living in the lowlands in the cooler months and the mountainous regions in the warmer months.'

The people inhabiting the hub at the time had dark skin and dark hair, perhaps resembling the Gumuz or Anuak people now living in parts of East Africa.

'Cave art simultaneously appeared as soon as people left the hub. So these cultural achievements might have been brewed while in the hub,' Pagani said.

However, no fossilized remains of Homo sapiens have been recovered in the Persian PLatea, but have been found in Arabia and the Levant - this group would be direct descendants of those from the hub, the study claimed.

Homo sapiens was not the first human species to live outside of Africa - including the area encompassing the hub. Ancient interbreeding by our species has left a small Neanderthal contribution to the DNA of modern non-Africans.

'Neanderthals are attested in the area before the arrival of Homo sapiens, so the hub may well have been where that interaction took place,' Vallini said.