Posted by
Michael Weilert on Sep 29, 2014 in
Michael Weilert MD |
Comments Off on Ancient Genome Discovered
While it doesn’t seem like a 2,330 year-old skeleton from the southernmost tip of Africa could tell us a lot about our genetic ancestry, it actually can reveal a great deal. This skeleton’s DNA profile is one of the “earliest diverged” found to date in a region where modern humans are believed to have originated from some 200,000 years ago. The man’s maternal (or mitochondrial) DNA was sequenced to effectively provide clues to early modern human prehistory and evolution. This mitochondrial DNA provided the first evidence that humans originally came from Africa, and...