Overview
- The study infers a single origin of anthropophily in the Anopheles Leucosphyrus group, likely spread by adaptive introgression in Sundaland.
- Scientists analyzed 38–40 genomes across 11 species, building a multilocus phylogeny to reconstruct relationships and timing.
- With no suitable mosquito fossils, dates were estimated using an insect mutation rate adjusted for coding genes and cross-checked with mitochondrial clocks.
- Ancestral mosquitoes fed on arboreal nonhuman primates, then descended to the forest floor to exploit terrestrial hosts, opening the path to human specialization.
- The inferred timing overlaps with proposed Homo erectus presence in the region, offering indirect biological evidence of early hominin populations; the findings appear in Scientific Reports under lead authors Upasana Singh and Catherine Walton.