This is in The New York Times today. A new survey of human DNA conducted by three research teams, all working separately to see if they would arrive at the same conclusion, indeed did so: every non-African on the planet can be traced to a single exodus of a group of Africans from Africa–not a single couple, but a group–just 50,000-80,000 years ago. Regardless of where we live on the planet, our shared ancestors aren’t from Mesopotamia (i.e. Adam and Eve, who, according to the myth in Genesis, were located in the Garden of Eden between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), but from Africa. Africa.
So here’s the bottom line: (1) our species has never bottlenecked at two people; and (2) our species evolved in Africa, not Mesopotamia.
Time to lose those racist depictions of Adam and Eve as white, mmm-kay.
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So, in a sense, when I emigrated to Johannesburg from the UK in ’79 in a sense, I was going back to my roots!
As an Assyrian (i.e. Mesopotamia) I am saddened by this. But as scientist, what an awesome finding.