Overview
- An international team reports in Scientific Reports that an ancestral lineage in the Anopheles leucosphyrus group began preferring human hosts between roughly 2.9 and 1.6 million years ago.
- Genomic data from 38 mosquitoes spanning 11 species were used to reconstruct evolutionary history and pinpoint a single origin of anthropophily in Sundaland.
- The inferred timing overlaps with the presence of Homo erectus in the region around 1.8 million years ago, indicating early hominins—not modern humans—drove the shift.
- Researchers note host preference changes likely involved alterations to odor-detection genes that enabled mosquitoes to target hominin body scent.
- The Southeast Asian shift predates similar human-feeding origins proposed for major African malaria vectors by hundreds of thousands to more than a million years, adding context for modern disease ecology.