30
September 2004
The human family
Many of us trace our ancestry to one or two regions of the world and believe that our closest relationship to an individual from another continent may date back to the time that humans first left Africa. New data, from genetic and mathematical analysis of biparental rather than the more commonly studied uniparental mode of descent, show that we may be much more closely related than we think. A single individual living as recently as 1000 to 2000 BC was an ancestor of all people on the Earth today. And a few thousand years before that, everyone in the world was either an ancestor of all people living today or of no-one. These findings could dramatically alter how we think about networks of ancestry and about human relatedness.
Modelling the recent common ancestry of all
living humans
DOUGLAS L. T. ROHDE, STEVE OLSON & JOSEPH T. CHANG
Nature 431, 562–566 (2004); doi:10.1038/nature02842
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Human evolution: Pedigrees for all humanity
JOTUN HEIN
Simulations based on a model of human population history and geography
find that an individual that is the genealogical ancestor of all living
humans existed just a few thousand years ago.
Nature 431, 518–519 (2004); doi:10.1038/431518a
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