Human Migration

Based on the following papers: 1. Review: The application of molecular genetic approaches to the study of human evolution. 2. Recovering the geographic origin of early modern humans by realistic and spatially explicit simulations. 3. Support from the relationship of genetic and geographic distance in human populations for a serial founder effect originating in Africa. 1. Introduction This lecture describes recent research on Human Migration by analyzing DNA of living humans collected from different locations. They studied genetic variation in DNA from samples collected from humans at different places. Recent genetics and archeological studies suggested that the modern humans had a unique origin in Africa. The papers discussed in the paper made studies on quantifying the likelihood of this model, compared to alternative hypotheses of human evolution. They considered various models and calculated the likelihood of each model through simulations. Considering a worldwide set of geographic locations as possible sources of the human expansion, they found that variations in the genetic data of the globally distributed populations are best explained by an expansion originating in Africa, and that no geographic origin outside of Africa can explain the observed patterns of genetic diversity as well.