Genetics and material culture support repeated expansions into Paleolithic Eurasia from a population hub out of Africa

The population dynamics that followed the out of Africa expansion (OoA) and ultimately led to the formation of Oceanian, West and East Eurasian macro populations have long been debated 1-4. Furthermore, with the OoA being dated between 70 kya 1,4,5 and 65 kya 6 and the earliest splits between West and East Eurasian populations being inferred not earlier than 43 kya from modern DNA data 1,4,7, an additional question concerns the whereabouts of the early migrants out of Africa before those differentiations. Shedding light on these population dynamics may, in turn, provide clues to better understand cultural evolution in Eurasia between 50 kya and 35 kya, where the development of new technologies may be correlated to parallel independent evolution paths, to the arrival of new populations, or to long-term processes of cultural and biological exchanges. Here we jointly re-analyze Eurasian Paleolithic DNA available to date in light of material culture, and provide a comprehensive population model with minimal admixture events. Our integrated approach i) maintains Zlaty K[u][n] genetically as the most basal out of Africa human lineage sequenced to date, also in comparison to Oceanians and putatively links it with non-Mousterian material cultures documented in Europe 48-43 kya; ii) infers the presence of an OoA population Hub from which a major wave broadly associated with Initial Upper Paleolithic lithic industries emanated to populate West and East Eurasia before or around 45 kya, and of which UstIshim, Bacho Kiro and Tianyuan were unadmixed descendants; iii) proposes a parsimonious placement of Oase1 as an individual related to Bacho Kiro who experienced additional Neanderthal introgression; and iv) explains the East/West Eurasian population split as a longer permanence of the latter in the OoA Hub, followed by a second population expansion (before 37 kya), broadly associated with Upper Paleolithic industries, that largely replaced pre-existing humans in Europe, and admixed with the previous wave to form Yana and Malta in Siberia and, to a greater extent, GoyetQ116-1 in Belgium.