Aboriginal hair from Cambridge’s Duckworth Collection reveals history of human dispersals.
In a major scientific breakthrough, scientists throw new light onto a long-standing problem in recent human evolution - how many major waves of migration were involved in the first colonization of the world by early modern humans. In a new paper published in Science today, Eske Willerslev from Copenhagen, together with a large international collaborative team, explore the secrets of an ancient Australian genome to show that all the world’s people outside Africa today descend from two separate waves of dispersal – an early one that led to the colonization of Australia, and a later one from which most Eurasian populations today derive. Such a theory had been proposed before by Lahr & Foley, co-authors in the Science study, as well as other scientists like Stringer, Kingdom and Cavalli-Sforza, but this is the first strong genetic evidence in its favour.  read more