It is the greatest journey in history, and now the story of how the first members of our species walked out of their African homeland to colonise almost every corner of the world is being told by reading the DNA of their living descendents.
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Half a million people from around the globe are participating in an ambitious project to reconstruct some of the ancient migratory routes that took Homo sapiens from their ancient African homelands to the relatively new territories of Asia, Europe, Oceania and America.
Hidden within the genetic makeup of people alive today is the encoded story of how their ancient ancestors made this epic journey, which covered many thousands of miles over many tens of thousands of years to complete.
The Genographic Project, a landmark study into ancient human migrations, aims to decode these hidden signposts within our DNA. By doing so, the project hopes to unravel the complex movements of the earliest men and women who were driven through necessity or curiosity to explore new territories and establish fresh roots in strange lands.
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One of the first big surprises of the Genographic Project, for instance, is the discovery that the initial journey out of Africa may not have been through the "northern route" of the Sinai Peninsula and Middle East, as initially proposed. Instead, they seem to have moved out of Africa by a "southern route" at the Bab-el-Mandeb straits at the mouth of the Red Sea separating East Africa from southern Arabia.
This migration may have required boats to traverse the shallow waters that would have existed there 60,000 years ago. But even with this apparent physical obstacle, scientists believe that the DNA analysis of the female X chromosome of present-day humans suggests it is still the most likely route taken out of Africa. "This was really the first study that had used that kind of genetic information to look at global patterns of human variability," said Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project and explorer-in-residence at National Geographic, one of the project's sponsors.
"What it confirmed was that the earliest migration out of Africa, and probably the major migration, had gone out through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait to India. There could have been subsequent migrations out via the Middle East but certainly the majority of people trace back to that original migration event, and we're still tracing out the details of exactly what happened."
Read more here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/decoded-the-mystery-of-human-migration-6283445.html
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