A new study suggests that malaria played a crucial role in shaping early human migrations across Africa — long before the rise of agriculture. By combining climate models with settlement data, researchers found that prehistoric humans actively avoided malaria-prone regions for over 70,000 years.
The disease, spread by Anopheles mosquito carrying Plasmodium falciparum, likely influenced where populations settled and how they evolved.
This challenges the long-held belief that infectious diseases only became significant after farming began. Instead, malaria may have had a transformative impact on human evolution, shaping population structures and movement patterns in deep prehistory.

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