Stephen Oppenheimer's genetic research, combined with new archaeological finds, is upsetting many of the human migration theories we learned in school and have been seeing in National Geographic for so long. An interactive website, on which you can dig into significant detail or just watch the cool graphics, maps out the human departure(s) from East Africa throughout the world. Native American migrations are not what we thought. The settling of Southeast Asia is not what we thought. The origins of the Europeans is only partly what we thought.
Oppenheimer's research leads into other fascinating areas for those of European ancestry: how little the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans contributed to the genetic stock of Great Britain; where the earliest surviving genetic lines are.
Brand new to me was the knowledge that the human population was reduced to about 10,000 people 74,000 years ago. The most powerful volcanic eruption in 2 million years came very near to wiping us out because of the deposited ash and ensuing cold.
1 comment:
Interesting stuff. On a related note there's this (I hope link tags work):
Neanderthals "were flame-haired"
Genetics is fascinating!
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