Friday, June 27, 2003

Out of Africa - Human Origins - 213 LexiLine Journal

Welcome!




As an alumnus of Stanford University I get a Stanford newsletter
about goings on at "the Farm", as Stanford is locally called [so-
called because the University used to be the farm of Leland Stanford
Senior until he willed his land and fortune to establish Stanford in
honor of his untimely deceased son, whence the still-standing
official name of "Leland Stanford Junior University" for Stanford.]

At the URL

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/may28/humans-528.html

you will find a most interesting article by Mark Shwartz entitled
"DNA suggests humans descend from small ancestral population "
indicating that humans came "out of Africa" into the rest of the
world only about 70000 years ago.

As is written there concerning DNA results:

"Our results are consistent with the 'out-of-Africa' theory,
according to which a sub-Saharan African ancestral population gave
rise to all populations of anatomically modern humans through a
chain of migrations to the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Oceania and
America," Feldman noted.

...

"The data revealed a genetic split between the ancestors of these
hunter-gatherer populations and the ancestors of contemporary
African farming people -- Bantu speakers who inhabit many countries
in southern Africa. "This division occurred between 70,000 and
140,000 years ago and was followed by the expansion out of Africa
into Eurasia, Oceania, East Asia and the Americas -- in that order,"
Feldman said.

This result is consistent with an earlier study in which Feldman and
others analyzed the Y chromosomes of more than 1,000 men from 21
different populations. In that study, the researchers concluded that
the first human migration from Africa may have occurred roughly
66,000 years ago."

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