“Henn and her team report ,” says Matt Kaplan, “that the genetics of the !Khomani and Namibian Bushmen, the Sandawe and the Biaka Pygmies of the Central African Republic seem to be the most diverse, and thus the oldest, of any [human genotypes] found among modern humans.”
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- Non-African humans are genetically most similar to East Africans, those who migrated out of Africa. This new data suggest to at least one SciAm commentator that our East African ancestors were descendants of, and not the ancestors of, those whose gene pool also gave rise to the tribes in this study.
The title comes from scientific slang that pronounces SNP as “snip”. A single-nucleotide polymorphism is a DNA sequence variation occurring when a single nucleotide — A, T, C, or G— in the genome (or other shared sequence) differs between members of a species (or between paired chromosomes in an individual).
A SciAm commentator (seemingly not a Climate Change denier robot since no profits seem involved andsince no knee-jerk Creationists seem to be subscribed) asks, “Is it possible that the species originated in East Africa, migrated south, and only those who migrated south survived to return to the north and beyond?”
Another SciAm commentator readily agrees, “The current distribution of genetic populations may better represent the location of the largest population of Toba eruption survivors (~70kya), for example, than the origin location of modern humans.”
