And the goal is to sample DNA from people all over the world, both indigenous populations and the general public, |
But the question of how we migrated around the planet, how we populated the world, in effect, is still an open one. |
Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes. |
Genetics, I think, resoundingly has answered the question of where we ultimately came from, we came out of Africa. And we came out quite recently, within the last 50 or 60 thousand years, |
His skin was probably not that dark, nor was he that muscular, |
IBM is helping to greatly advance and expedite quality sampling while providing our project investigators peace of mind that the information they are gathering is securely stored and protected. |
It was tough going. His world was in the grips of the last Ice Age. In Southern Africa it was drier than now, water was difficult to obtain and so were animals, |
So it really is a synthetic effort to understand our common past. |
So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it -- the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology, |
The pieces of DNA you find in the Y-chromosome don't go through the same shuffling process that other DNA undergoes, so it is easier to trace, |
The project is to focus on reconstructing how humans moved around the world, to tell of their migratory routes, |
This is a giant leap forward for field expeditions everywhere, |
We are going through a process of mass cultural extinction. |
We believe that some of Adam's characteristics can still be seen in Southern Africa but we need to find out what they are, |
We want everybody to have a chance to participate in this, because it is really the story of all of us, that's what we are trying to figure out. |