JENA, GERMANY—According to a statement released by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, an international team of researchers compared models for the distribution of three major mosquito complexes, paleoclimate models, and places where early humans lived in sub-Saharan Africa between 5,000 and 74,000 years ago. The resulting map indicates that people avoided or died out in areas where Plasmodium falciparum-induced malaria, a disease transmitted by mosquitoes, was likely prevalent. “The effects of these choices shaped human demography for the last 74,000 years, and likely much earlier,” said Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge. “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,” she explained. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Science Advances. For more on the study of ancient illness, go to "Dawn of a Disease."
