The Journey of Man: A Genetic OdysseyPenguin Adult, 2003 M05 29 - 288 pages Around 60,000 years ago, a man, identical to us in all important respects, walked the soil of Africa. Every man alive today is descended from him. How did he come to be father to all of us - a real-life Adam? And why do we come in such a huge variety of sizes, shapes, types and races if we all share a single prehistoric ancestor?
In this fascinating book, Spencer Wells shows how the truth about our ancestors is hidden in our genetic code, and reveals how developments in the cutting-edge science of population genetics have made it possible not just to discover where our ancestors lived (and who they may have fought, loved, learned from and influence) but to create a family tree for the whole of humanity. |
From inside the book
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... mitochondrial DNA ( mtDNA ) are ten times more common than in the rest of our genome , it was a good place to look . Rebecca Cann , as part of her PhD work in Wilson's laboratory , began to study the pattern of mtDNA variation in humans ...
... mitochondrial genome . - The Y turns out to provide population geneticists with the most useful tool available for ... DNA , leaving us in the odd situation of having small pieces of our genome that are bacterial in origin . So in the case of ...
A Genetic Odyssey Spencer Wells. travellers yielded analysable DNA , as did the dried remains from mummies and other desert - dwellers . Even then , the analysis was almost always limited to mitochondrial DNA , present in huge numbers of ...