African genomes

“We‘re all Africa,” according to a line from the official song of the 2010 Fifa World Cup held in South Africa, Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”. And unlike John F. Kennedy’s tenuous claim to Berlinerdom, this statement of global solidarity and unity actually has a very sound scientific foundation. There is now overwhelming evidence and agreement that modern humans originated in Africa and all nonAfrican populations descend from a relatively small group of migrants that left the continent some 50,000 years ago at the latest. Recent research suggests the migrants had some unspecified interactions with Neanderthals who had left earlier before they went on to spread out over the rest of the world. This course of events implies that Africa holds the keys to the history of our species. It also has some profound implications that completely devalue the traditional western concept of ‘race’. In fact, the vast majority of genetic diversity is to be found between the ethnic groups within Africa, which Europeans have traditionally bundled together as ‘the black race’. We now know that Europeans, Asians, and Native Americans, all descending from the same group of migrants, are more closely related to each other than an African villager may be to the people living behind the next mountain. Feature