Geneticists Track More of Earliest Humans’ First Itineraries

A conference of population geneticists and archeologists has brought the scientific community one step closer to putting together the puzzle of Homo sapiens’ genealogical tree. Technological advancements in genetics now allow scientists to pinpoint DNA information to historical events, like the introduction of agriculture from Anatolia to Europe by analyzing certain Y-chromosome codes of men in Turkey. Answers to questions like ‘Who populated the Americas? Or Oceania?’ are now being found in the genomes of the regions’ inhabitants. The recent discovery of the ‘language gene’, which is found in every human’s DNA, lends much support to the controversial theory that language is what made humans different from the rest of their evolutionary relatives. The mobilization of people across borders, regions, or even continents began about 100,000 years ago, and it is still a phenomenon that we experience today; as genetics advances, scientists will be able to better understand our family tree. - YaleGlobal