Doubt cast on human origins
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.A STUDY into the origins of man has cast doubt on the idea that Homo sapiens evolved from a single population of ancestors who lived in Africa.
The findings challenge the idea that there was a single cradle of humankind somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa about 100,000 years ago, where the first recognisably contemporary people lived in isolation from other hominid species.
A study of the variation within a single human gene has been used to reconstruct evolutionary events dating back several million years. A genetic analysis of 16 Africans and 19 non-Africans revealed mutations in the gene that could have come about only after the division of the ancient population when our ancestors were starting to trek out of Africa.
Present-day Africans have a lot of variation - mutations - in the gene compared with Europeans and Asians, indicating that the forces of evolutionary change had worked on at least two separate ancestral populations.
"We found a gene in humans that has a very interesting history," said Dr Jody Hey, a visiting research fellow in genetics at the University of Edinburgh, co-author of the work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It provides evidence of a split in the ancestral human population at about 200,000 years ago, separating Africans and non-Africans. What's unique about our study is that it yields a date when population splitting first started."
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments