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Eden? Maybe. But Where’s the Apple Tree?
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By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: April 30, 2009
Locations for the Garden of Eden have been offered many times before, but seldom in the somewhat inhospitable borderland where Angola and Namibia meet.

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A new genetic survey of people in Africa, the largest of its kind, suggests, however, that the region in southwest Africa seems, on the present evidence, to be the origin of modern humans. The authors have also identified some 14 ancestral populations.

The new data goes far toward equalizing the genetic picture of the world, given that most genetic information has come from European and Asian populations. But because it comes from Africa, the continent on which the human lineage evolved, it also sheds light on the origins of human life.

“I think this is an enormously impressive piece of work,” said Alison Brooks, a specialist on African anthropology at George Washington University.

The origin of a species is generally taken to be the place where its individuals show the greatest genetic diversity. For humans, when the new African data is combined with DNA information from the rest of the world, this spot lies on the coast of southwest Africa near the Kalahari Desert, the research team, led by Sarah A. Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, said in this week’s issue of Science.

Dr. Brooks, who spent many years in the area, said that it had some trees but that it also had deep sand and was not particularly garden-like. The area is a homeland of the Bushmen or San people, whose language is distinguished by its many click sounds.

But the San in the past might not have been restricted to where they are now, she said. The San are thought to have once occupied a much larger area, one that probably stretched from southern Africa up the east coast to as far as present-day Ethiopia.

Since the geneticists’ calculations refer to people, not geography, the San — and therefore the site of greatest human diversity — might have been located elsewhere in the past.

Christopher Ehret, an expert on African languages at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of Dr. Tishkoff’s team, has detected traces of words borrowed from click languages in East African languages. This suggests that proto-Khoisan, the inferred ancestral language of all click-speakers, may have originated in East Africa, Dr. Brooks said.

The language of the first modern humans may have undergone a very early branching, Dr. Ehret said, with the Khoisan click languages on one branch and the other three language groups of Africa — Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian and Afroasiatic — on the other branch. Clicks are difficult to pronounce fluently and with a single exception no click languages are known outside Africa.

Another finding of the Tishkoff-Ehret team is that African languages tend to be highly correlated with the genetics of their speakers, a finding that helps indicate cases of language replacement. The various Pygmy groups in Africa, the team has found, show distant genetic relationships to the San and other click-speakers, suggesting the pygmies, too, once spoke Khoisan languages but have now adopted those of their neighbors.

Another instance of a mismatch between language and genetics concerns the Luo, an ethnic group in Kenya to which President Obama’s father belonged. The Luo speak a Nilo-Saharan language and are thought of as a people of Sudanese origin, but genetically they have a heavy mixture of Bantu speakers’ genes, Dr. Tishkoff said.

Dr. Tishkoff’s team has also calculated the exit point from which a small human group — maybe a single tribal band of 150 people — left Africa some 50,000 years ago and populated the rest of the world. The region is near the midpoint of the African coast of the Red Sea.

Dr. Tishkoff and her colleagues found that the 14 ancestral African populations they detected are now highly mixed, with the exception of the Bantu speakers.


////////////////May 1, 2009 6:51 PM
Garden of Eden: The Origin Of Modern Humans
by prancingpapio

A new genetic survey by Dr. Sarah A. Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania and her team has found that modern humans originated in an area between Namibia and Angola, on the coast of southwest Africa. Read the New York Times Article: Eden? Maybe. But Where’s the Apple Tree?

However, this harsh and inhospitable area is nothing Eden-like, they said. The origin of a species, like modern humans, is generally pinpointed to a place where its individuals show the highest genetic diversity. After comparing genetic data from populations around the world, the researchers pinpointed the population with the highest genetic diversity – somewhere on the coast of southwest Africa near the Kalahari Desert. The Bushmen or San people currently call this area their home.

The researchers have also calculated the exit point of modern humans that left Africa about 50,000 years ago. The exit point lies in an area of the African coast of the Red Sea. If the “Out Of Africa” theory holds true, this tribal group of about 150 people that left Africa at that exit point displaced other archaic Homo sapiens populations from different continents, giving rise to the current modern human populations.



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//////////////Why having girls makes fathers more leftwing
It's no secret that daughters have a special relationship with their dads. But their influence may be even more profound. Two new studies suggest that daughters - who are more likely to favour higher taxes and public spending - cause fathers to become more compassionate and move to the left
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Amelia Hill
The Observer, Sunday 24 May 2009
Article history

Colin Brazier with wife Jo, expecting their first son, and five daughters. Photograph: Russell Sach/Rex Features

Long before he had a tribe of children to call his own, Brad Pitt broke down in tears on primetime television when talking about how much he wanted to have a daughter. "Little girls, they just crush me - they break my heart," he said.

Now with three daughters - and three sons - Pitt has more than achieved his dream. He will also have had ample opportunity to experience the powerful influence that little girls have on their fathers: the most masculine man will learn to love pink, take part in endless games of dressing up, and even bake fairy cakes if that's what his little princess desires.

According to new research, however, daughters have an even more profound effect on their daddies: fathers, say Professor Andrew Oswald, from Warwick University, and Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee, of York University, will shift their political allegiance for their daughters. Using research from the British Household Panel Survey, the two economists found that the more daughters there are in a household, the more likely their father is to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat.



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