There’s a write-up in The New York Times on a new paper to come out in PNAS soon on the relationship of disease variants to human demographic history over the past few hundred thousand years. I’ll probably review the paper when it comes out, but since it is the holidays & all here in the states it might be delayed a bit more than typical. Roots of Disease Found to Vary by Continent is the article. Here’s the most important bit:
The Stanford study also sheds light on major aspects of human population history, like the time at which the first modern humans emigrated from Africa. Archaeologists believe it was about 50,000 years ago, since no modern human remains older than this have yet been found outside of Africa, but geneticists have long favored much earlier dates. Dr. Gravel and Dr. Bustamante now calculate that 51,000 years ago, give or take several thousand years, is the date best supported by genetic data, bringing the geneticists’ date into alignment with the archaeologists’ favored time for the exit from Africa.
The common variations in the human genome were mostly present in the ancestral human population in Africa and have been inherited …