hunter gatherer – NIH Director's Blog (original) (raw)

Out of Africa: DNA Analysis Points to a Single Major Exodus

Posted on September 27th, 2016 by Dr. Francis Collins

Credit: NASA

If you go back far enough, the ancestors of all people trace to Africa. That much is clear. We are all Africans. But there’s been considerable room for debate about exactly when and how many times modern humans made their way out of Africa to take up residence in distant locations throughout the world. It’s also unclear what evolutionary or other factors might have driven our human ancestors to set off on such a perilous and uncertain journey (or journeys) in the first place.

By analyzing 787 newly sequenced complete human genomes representing more than 280 diverse and understudied populations, three new studies—two of which received NIH funding—now help to fill in some of those missing pages of our evolutionary history. The genomic evidence suggests that the earliest human inhabitants of Eurasia came from Africa and began to diverge genetically at least 50,000 years ago. While the new studies differ somewhat in their conclusions, the findings also lend support to the notion that our modern human ancestors dispersed out of Africa primarily in a single migratory event. If an earlier and ultimately failed voyage occurred, it left little trace in the genomes of people alive today.

Posted In: Science

Tags: Aborigines, Africa, anthropology, Australia, DNA, DNA analysis, Euroasia, evolution, evolutionary biology, genome, genomic history, genomics, human ancestry, human evolution, human genetics, human migration, hunter gatherer, molecular anthropology, New Guinea, Out of Africa, Papuans, population genetics, Sahul, Simons Genome Diversity Project