I recently watched a series of videos on Youtube, which I found absolutely fascinating and very thought provoking
Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (Part 1 of 13)
The Journey of Man is a documentary that talks about our evolution, our recent history, and how we came to be to the way we are today. It looks at the Y chromosome, that's passed down from male to male, and tracks the marker mutations to map our ancestors' journey. It's how we conquered the Earth in just the last 59,000 years.
On Sunday the following programme is on,
The Incredible Human Journey Episode one Sunday, 21:30 on BBC Two
Dr Alice Roberts travels the globe to discover the incredible story of how humans left Africa to colonise the world - overcoming hostile terrain, extreme weather and other species of human. She pieces together precious fragments of bone, stone and new DNA evidence and discovers how this journey changed these African ancestors into the people of today. Alice travels to Africa in search of the birthplace of the first people. They were so few in number and so vulnerable that today they would probably be considered an endangered species. So what allowed them to survive at all? The Bushmen of the Kalahari have some answers - the unique design of the human body made them efficient hunters and the ancient click language of the Bushmen points to an early ability to organise and plan. Humans survived there, but Africa was to all intents and purposes a sealed continent. So how and by what route did humans make it out of Africa? Astonishing genetic evidence reveals that everyone alive today who is not African descends from just one successful, tiny group which left the continent in a single crossing, an event that may have happened around 70 thousand years ago. But how did they do it? Alice goes searching for clues in the remote Arabian Desert.
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