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Today, all non-Africans are known to have descended from a small group of people that ventured into Eurasia around 50,000 years ago. However, fossil evidence shows that there were numerous failed dispersals before this time that left no detectable traces in living people.

In a new study published today in the journal in Nature, scientists say that from around 70,000 years ago, early humans began to exploit different habitat types in Africa in ways not seen before.

At this time, our ancestors started to live in the equatorial forests of West and Central Africa, and in the Sahara and Sahel desert regions of North Africa, where they encountered a range of new environmental conditions.

As they adapted to life in these diverse habitats, early humans gained the flexibility to tackle the range of novel environmental conditions they would encounter during their expansion out of Africa.

This increase in the human niche may have been the result of social adaptations, such as long-distance social networks, which allowed for an increase in cultural exchange. The process would have been self-reinforcing: as people started to inhabit a wider proportion of the African continent, regions previously disconnected would have come into contact, leading to further exchanges and possibly even greater flexibility. The final outcome was that our species became the ultimate generalist, able to tackle a wider range of environments.

Andrea Manica, Professor of Evolutionary Ecology in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, who co-led the study with Professor Eleanor Scerri from the Max Plank Institute of Bioanthropology in Germany, said: “Around 70,000-50,000 years ago, the easiest route out of Africa would have been more challenging than during previous periods, and yet this expansion was big - and ultimately successful.”

Manica added: “It’s incredibly exciting that we were able to look back in time and pinpoint the changes that enabled our ancestors to successfully migrate out of Africa.”

Dr Emily Hallett of Loyola University Chicago, co-lead author of the study, said: “We assembled a dataset of archaeological sites and environmental information covering the last 120,000 years in Africa. We used methods developed in ecology to understand changes in human environmental niches - the habitats humans can use and thrive in - during this time.” 

Dr Michela Leonardi at the University of Cambridge and London’s Natural History Museum, the study’s other lead author, said: “Our results showed that the human niche began to expand significantly from 70,000 years ago, and that this expansion was driven by humans increasing their use of diverse habitat types, from forests to arid deserts.” 

Many explanations for the uniquely successful dispersal out of Africa have previously been made, from technological innovations, to immunities granted by interbreeding with Eurasian hominins. But there is no evidence of technological innovation, and previous interbreeding does not appear to have helped the long-term success of previous attempts to spread out of Africa.

“Unlike previous humans dispersing out of Africa, those human groups moving into Eurasia after around 60-50,000 years ago were equipped with a distinctive ecological flexibility as a result of coping with climatically challenging habitats,” said Scerri. “This likely provided a key mechanism for the adaptive success of our species beyond their African homeland.”

Previous human dispersals out of Africa - which were not successful in the long term - seem to have happened during particularly favourable windows of increased rainfall in the Saharo-Arabian desert belt, which created ‘green corridors’ for people to move into Eurasia.

The environmental flexibility developed in Africa from around 70,000 years ago ultimately resulted in modern humans’ unique ability to adapt and thrive in diverse environments, and to cope with varying environmental conditions throughout life.

This research was supported by funding from the Max Planck Society, European Research Council and Leverhulme Trust.

Adapted from a press release by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Germany

Reference: Hallett, E. Y. et al: ‘Major expansion in the human niche preceded out of Africa dispersal.’ Nature, June 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09154-0.

Before the ‘Out of Africa’ migration that led our ancestors into Eurasia and beyond, human populations learned to adapt to new and challenging habitats including African forests and deserts, which was key to the long-term success of our species’ dispersal.

It’s incredibly exciting that we were able to look back in time and pinpoint the changes that enabled our ancestors to successfully migrate out of Africa.Andrea ManicaOndrej Pelanek and Martin PelanekAfrican Bush Elephant

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The successful Cambridge grantees’ work covers a range of research areas, including the development of next-generation semiconductors, new methods to identify dyslexia in young children, how diseases spread between humans and animals, and the early changes that happen in cells before breast cancer develops, with the goal of finding ways to stop the disease before it starts.

The funding, worth €721 million in total, will go to 281 leading researchers across Europe. The Advanced Grant competition is one of the most prestigious and competitive funding schemes in the EU and associated countries, including the UK. It gives senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. Advanced Grants may be awarded up to € 2.5 million for a period of five years. The grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. The UK agreed a deal to associate to Horizon Europe in September 2023.

This competition attracted 2,534 proposals, which were reviewed by panels of internationally renowned researchers. Over 11% of proposals were selected for funding. Estimates show that the grants will create approximately 2,700 jobs in the teams of new grantees. The new grantees will be based at universities and research centres in 23 EU Member States and associated countries, notably in the UK (56 grants), Germany (35), Italy (25), the Netherlands (24), and France (23).

“Many congratulations to our Cambridge colleagues on these prestigious ERC funding awards,” said Professor Sir John Aston, Cambridge’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research. “This type of long-term funding is invaluable, allowing senior researchers the time and space to develop potential solutions for some of biggest challenges we face. We are so fortunate at Cambridge to have so many world-leading researchers across a range of disciplines, and I look forward to seeing the outcomes of their work.”

The Cambridge recipients of 2025 Advanced Grants are:

Professor Clare Bryant (Department of Veterinary Medicine) for investigating human and avian pattern recognition receptor activation of cell death pathways, and the impact on the host inflammatory response to zoonotic infections.

Professor Sir Richard Friend (Cavendish Laboratory/St John’s College) for bright high-spin molecular semiconductors.

Professor Usha Goswami (Department of Psychology/St John’s College) for a cross-language approach to the early identification of dyslexia and developmental language disorder using speech production measures with children.

Professor Regina Grafe (Faculty of History) for colonial credit and financial diversity in the Global South: Spanish America 1600-1820.

Professor Judy Hirst (MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit/Corpus Christi College) for the energy-converting mechanism of a modular biomachine: Uniting structure and function to establish the engineering principles of respiratory complex I.

Professor Matthew Juniper (Department of Engineering/Trinity College) for adjoint-accelerated inference and optimisation methods.

Professor Walid Khaled (Department of Pharmacology/Magdalene College) for understanding precancerous changes in breast cancer for the development of therapeutic interceptions.

Professor Adrian Liston (Department of Pathology/St Catharine’s College) for dissecting the code for regulatory T cell entry into the tissues and differentiation into tissue-resident cells.

Professor Róisín Owens (Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology/Newnham College) for conformal organic devices for electronic brain-gut readout and characterisation.

Professor Emma Rawlins (Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience/Gurdon Institute) for reprogramming lung epithelial cell lineages for regeneration.

Dr Marta Zlatic (Department of Zoology/Trinity College) for discovering the circuit and molecular basis of inter-strain and inter-species differences in learning

“These ERC grants are our commitment to making Europe the world’s hub for excellent research,” said Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation. “By supporting projects that have the potential to redefine whole fields, we are not just investing in science but in the future prosperity and resilience of our continent. In the next competition rounds, scientists moving to Europe will receive even greater support in setting up their labs and research teams here. This is part of our “Choose Europe for Science” initiative, designed to attract and retain the world’s top scientists.”

“Much of this pioneering research will contribute to solving some of the most pressing challenges we face - social, economic and environmental,” said Professor Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council. “Yet again, many scientists - around 260 - with ground-breaking ideas were rated as excellent, but remained unfunded due to a lack of funds at the ERC. We hope that more funding will be available in the future to support even more creative researchers in pursuing their scientific curiosity.”

Eleven senior researchers at the University of Cambridge have been awarded Advanced Grants from the European Research Council – the highest number of grants awarded to any institution in this latest funding round.

Westend61 via Getty ImagesScientist pipetting samples into eppendorf tube

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Research finds that appetite for bushmeat – rather than the black market for scales to use in traditional Chinese medicine – may be driving West Africa’s illegal hunting of one of the world’s most threatened mammals.