Know It All Anthropology

Humans are the last remaining hominin species and the only member of the genus Homo to have colonized the entire planet.

Africa is home to around 3,000 different groups of people: what is astonishing is that each group is more genetically different from the others than a European person is from an Asian person.

Modern biology completely contradicts the way we have traditionally created different human races, using markers such as skin color, and shows that we are one species, certainly culturally different to one another, but with the same genes.

This means that there is next to no variation between a person from Africa, Europe, or Asia—pick any two people at random from anywhere on the planet and they will be very closely related when you look at their DNA, much more so than is normal for such a widely dispersed animal species.

When ancient DNA was first recovered in 1984, from a museum specimen of a quagga, it showed that DNA could survive well beyond death.

The current, oldest human sample, from a cave in northern Spain, is 400,000 years old, but most aDNA samples are much younger. aDNA can be used to reconstruct how species have evolved, moved across time and space, and, in the case of humans and Neanderthals, interbred and exchanged genes and diseases—all of which was unknown before aDNA.

The colder the location and the more recent the date, the better the chances of recovering high-quality aDNA samples.

This is because after death the DNA chain starts to degrade—a process directly related to time and temperature.

Unlike modern genetic sampling (from saliva, hair, blood, or semen, for example), ancient genetic samples are typically of very low quality—and they are much shorter than modern samples.

Ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis is one of the most important developments within anthropology since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859.