Mattias Jakobsson rewrites human prehistory

“I want to know how we humans became who we are, so I am looking at the genetic changes that have been important for Homo sapiens in particular. That is what drives me,” says Mattias Jakobsson when we meet him in his office at the Evolutionary Biology Centre.

He has been based here since 2008, when he arrived directly from his postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan in the USA. At the time, neither he nor anyone else realised that, within the space of just a few years, he would help to somewhat redefine the conventional understanding of early human evolution.

The origins of Homo sapiens

Together with his research team, Mattias Jakobsson discovered in 2017 that modern humans had existed for much longer than was previously known. They reached this conclusion when analysing genetic material from the bones of individuals who lived in eastern South Africa around 2,000 years ago. The aim of the study was to determine which groups had lived in the area before the current populations migrated there from West Africa and later also from Europe. In other words, the aim was not to try to map the origins of humankind.

But when the researchers compared the DNA from the skeletons studied with that of other humans to piece together how the different population groups were related, they embarked on a journey through time they had not quite anticipated. They went so far back in time that they could see that the most recent common Homo sapiens ancestor must have lived 300,000 years ago, which is 100,000 years earlier than previously known.

Mattias Jakobsson and his colleagues have continued to study the traces of the very earliest Homo sapiens. At the end of 2025, they published a major study in the scientific journal Nature, in which they delved even deeper into prehistoric humans in southern Africa. The results opened up the possibility that there may be alternatives to the established view that East Africa is the cradle of humanity. This is a controversial idea.

“We haven’t been bold enough to say that it could be southern Africa, but we are on the verge of starting to point in that direction. We can say that we shouldn’t just look at East Africa. There are many other places that could be the site. If you follow the archaeology and the fossils, there is a fairly clear line of fossil finds in southern Africa that is more complete than in East Africa, for example,” says Mattias Jakobsson cautiously.

Out into the world

Today, researchers largely agree that a group of people left Africa around 80,000 years ago. On their journey to Europe and through Asia, they encountered other human groups, such as Neanderthals. Thanks to genetic studies, we now know that they had children together and that all people outside Africa carry genes from Neanderthals.

In Asia, the new arrivals came into contact with another relative – the so-called Denisovan. They also had children with them. The Denisovan was unknown to science until 2008, when the Swedish Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo sequenced the DNA of a little finger bone found in Denisova Cave in Siberia. Mattias Jakobsson has spent many years studying the genetics of this mysterious human and how its genes live on in modern humans.

“The strange thing about the Denisovans is that all the discoveries have been made in Siberia and East Asia, yet the people with the most Denisovan genetic material are found in Oceania – not everywhere, but in certain places, such as the indigenous peoples of Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. There are certain indigenous peoples in the Philippines who have up to six percent of their genetic material from Denisovans,” says Mattias Jakobsson.

He and his colleagues are working closely with several universities and museums in the Philippines to not only gain a better understanding of this mysterious relative of ours but also to find out what significance this genetic contribution has had for those who carry Denisovan genes.

Humans become farmers

For hundreds of thousands of years, all humans lived as hunters and gatherers, but around 12,000 years ago something happened that changed everything. In what is now Turkey, people began to cultivate the land and settled down. This way of life spread across the world. In one of his early studies, from 2012, Mattias Jakobsson investigated how agriculture came to Scandinavia.

“At the time, school textbooks stated that the same people who lived during the hunter-gatherer Stone Age lived during the farming Stone Age and that people simply taught themselves agriculture,” he explains.

Farmers and hunter-gatherers genetically different

But Mattias Jakobsson’s research group was able to show that this was not quite the case. They analysed the genome of one individual who lived as a farmer during the Stone Age and three individuals who lived as hunter-gatherers. It turned out that the farmer and the hunter-gatherers were three times more genetically different than, for example, the populations of Finland and Italy today.

The study was the first to extract ancient DNA from more than one individual and from the entire genome. Since then, hundreds of similar studies have been carried out across Europe, all showing the same pattern – that earlier hunter-gatherer groups were assimilated and replaced by farmers originating from what is now Turkey.

Others were already here

When the first farmers arrived in Scandinavia, other people were already living here. They had arrived some 15,000 years ago, when the Ice Age began to ease its grip. Through genetic mapping, Mattias Jakobsson and his colleagues have been able to trace their route as well and see how our part of Europe was settled.

“One of the interesting discoveries we made a few years ago was that they came from two separate directions. One group came from the southwest and another from the northeast. The group from the east travelled north of the ice, which was still present at that time, and followed the Atlantic coast southwards,” says Mattias Jakobsson.

The groups are mixed

What attracted them was probably game animals.

“Both of these groups were hunter-gatherers. They met, mixed and became a single group,” says Mattias Jakobsson.

Around 6,000 years ago, the first farmers settled down in the area. This was followed by several waves of migration by different peoples. Some have left a greater mark on our genetic makeup than others. The picture of how all this happened has become increasingly clear, not least thanks to Mattias Jakobsson’s research.

Åsa Malmberg