Genetic Evidence
Genetic evidence from the late 1980s on the mitochondrial genome indicated that all living women can trace their maternal line of descent to a single female living in Africa about 200,000 years ago, the so-called Mitochondrial Eve. This led to a hypothesis that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, with a small founder population of humans leaving Africa and eventually replacing all archaic humans then living elsewhere without interbreeding. Recent analyses of DNA taken directly from Neanderthal specimens, however, indicates that they contributed to the genome of all humans outside of Africa. The Homo sapiens who populate the world outside Africa all have Neanderthals among their ancestors. Denisova hominins also contributed to the DNA of Melanesians and Australians.
Read more about this topic: Multiregional Origin Of Modern Humans
Famous quotes containing the words genetic and/or evidence:
“Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
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—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)