I just finished watching an an absolutely wonderful series of 3 documentaries produced for The CBC's Nature of Things, with David Suzuki, and hosted and directed by Niobe Thompson (anthropologist). The series The Great Human Odyssey explores , through the use of actors, real life tribes, drones and painstaking camera work, the long and aweinspiring journey that homo sapiens travelled to inhabit every corner of our world.
The first documentary of the series takes us through our species evolution within Africa. How we overcame the odds to survive in a harsh environment and learned to adapt to our surroundings and express ourselves.
Like other kinds of human who once shared our world, homo sapiens should have died away. Discover how our species faced near extinction in Africa, and then found a place to rebuild. Explore the birth of language and art at archeological excavations scientists are now calling “the cradle of the human mind”.
The second part of the series takes us out of Africa, and how we learned to continue to adapt to the environments in which we found ourselves. Along that journey, we met other hominids that had taken a similar journey out of Africa thousands of years before homo sapiens did. And we learn what happened to them.
How did we become our planet’s only global species, at home in every environment on Earth. Learn how our ancestors found a way through the deserts and out of Africa. Explore the meeting of Neanderthals and humans. And discover how we survived
In the third and final episode, our journey continues. Our species expands from Eurasia into the Pacific and outward from there.
Early humans eventually colonized Australia, the South Pacific, and the Americas. But how did our ancestors master the oceans? Learn how new discoveries in ancient DNA research are changing our understanding of the earliest sea voyages, from Easter Island to the Bering Strait.
These series bring together all the recent research on the evolution and expansion of homo sapiens and it's an incredible odyssey! Please set aside some time to watch all three episodes of these 1 hour documentaries. They are
so worth it!!
Below the mangled orange DNA is an older diary I posted in mid September last year. I'm posting it again with this diary because of it's relevance to the subject of these documentaries. I've edited it to cut out some unneeded fluff.
What's In A Genome? New Studies Reveal European Genetic History
The basic theory, called "serial founder effect model", declared that separate human enclaves developed differently because of geographic locations, accounting for the various looks of humans and other adaptations, such as the adaptation to thinner atmosphere in Tibetans and Andeans.
From the results of early DNA studies in the late 1980s and early ’90s, scientists argued that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa, and then expanded into Asia, Oceania, and Europe, beginning about 60,000 years ago. The idea was that modern humans colonized the rest of the world in a succession of small founding groups—each one a tiny sampling of the total modern human gene pool. These small, isolated groups settled new territory and replaced the archaic humans that lived there. As a result, humans in different parts of the world today have their own distinctive DNA signature, consisting of the genetic quirks of their ancestors who first settled the area, as well as the genetic adaptations to the local environment that evolved later.
Twenty years ago, the human genome had not been sufficiently mapped, so other than some basic DNA studies, little was known about the genetic make-up of modern man. However, a wealth of studies done on human DNA in recent years has led to some startling insights. One of which tells us that we didn't conquer Neandertals,
we mated with them:
We show that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.
So this mingling of body fluids, eggs and sperm must have happened shortly after humans began to migrate throughout the Eurasian continent, meeting other groups of our ancestors, joining with them and living a fairly nomadic lifestyle. Eventually humans settled in geographic areas and by roughly 8,000 years ago, were introduced to farming by new settlers from the Levant and Anatolia in the near east.
New studies done by Joseph Pickrell at the New York Genome Center and David Reich at Harvard University have shown the diversity of the human genome. they show that all modern humans share both the DNA of both the hunter- gatherer and the farmers, so again, we conveniently mated, instead of warring. But some genetic material was not from either the hunter gatherers or the farmers.
So whose was it?
The answer came from sampling the DNA of nine ancient bodies; a 7,000 year old farmer from Germany, several 7 and 8,000 year old hunter gatherers from Luxembourg and Sweden, and the remains of a 24,000 year old boy buried at Mal'ta near Lake Bailkal in eastern Siberia.
The findings suggest that the arrival of modern humans into Europe more than 40,000 years ago was followed by an influx of farmers some 8,000 years ago, with a third wave of migrants coming from north Eurasia perhaps 5,000 years ago. Others from the same population of north Eurasians took off towards the Americas and gave rise to Native Americans.
Those European ancestors didn't just mate with Neandertals and farmers, but also with the ancestors of
Native Americans.
Here we sequence the draft genome of an approximately 24,000-year-old individual (MA-1), from Mal’ta in south-central Siberia9, to an average depth of 13. To our knowledge this is the oldest anatomically modern human genome reported to date. The MA-1 mitochondrial genome belongs to haplogroup U, which has also been found at high frequency among Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers10–12, and the Y chromosome of MA-1 is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and near the root of most Native American lineages5. Similarly, we find autosomal evidence that MA-1 is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and genetically closely related to modern-day Native Americans, with no close affinity to east Asians.
And yet another surprise!! Native Americans did not have Asian roots, but
western Eurasian roots
Here we report the genome sequence of a male infant (Anzick-1) recovered from the Anzick burial site in western Montana. The human bones date to 10,705 ± 35 (14)C years bp (approximately 12,707-12,556 calendar years bp) and were directly associated with Clovis tools. We sequenced the genome to an average depth of 14.4× and show that the gene flow from the Siberian Upper Palaeolithic Mal'ta population into Native American ancestors is also shared by the Anzick-1 individual and thus happened before 12,600 years bp. We also show that the Anzick-1 individual is more closely related to all indigenous American populations than to any other group. Our data are compatible with the hypothesis that Anzick-1 belonged to a population directly ancestral to many contemporary Native Americans. Finally, we find evidence of a deep divergence in Native American populations that predates the Anzick-1 individual.
In other words, we white people have a mix of genes and that mix includes African, Neandertal and North American Indian.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
More recent studies on how climate changes, specifically rainfall, helped homo sapiens manage to move around previously inaccessible portions of Africa and the Arabian interior:
http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/...
Past Horizons is an excellent site that offers many many articles on recent studies and findings in archaeology, and worth a visit. Explore!!
http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/