Article: Before the exodus; Human evolution.(African bushmen's mitochondrial DNA)

For two-thirds of its history, Homo sapiens lived exclusively in Africa. Only now are the details of that period becoming clear

MITOCHONDRIAL DNA is a remarkable thing. Itself the remnant of a strange evolutionary event (the merger of an ancient bacterium with the cell ancestral to all plant and animal life), it also carries the imprint of more recent evolution. In many species, humans included, it passes only from mother to child. No paternal genes get mixed into it. That makes it easy to see when particular genetic mutations happened, and thus to construct a human family tree.

The branches of that tree are now well studied. Humans started in Africa, spread to Asia ...

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