Genetic Study Finds Complexity in Cradle of Humanity

Genetic Study Finds Complexity in Cradle of Humanity

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The melting pot of early human history has just been given a good stir. The largest study of genetic variance across present-day populations in southern Africa suggests that there is no single place in Africa from which all modern humans emerged. Instead, our species is the result of mixing between numerous early human populations across a vast area.

Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University, Sweden, and his colleagues analysed around 2.3 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – variations in DNA that are useful for comparing regions of the genome between populations – in 220 individuals from 11 southern African populations.