Next time when you’re very pissed off at a specific population for invading another one’s territory, you should calm down and listen to what Austin Reynolds has to say, who’s an assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor University in Texas and who’s specialized in human population genetics.
New scientific research involving Reynolds and the analysis of ancient human DNA brings a new perspective over immigration. Many of us and political leaders around the world like to believe that certain populations have been living in a certain country since always, but the new study contradicts such claims.
Thousands of years of constant migration
The researchers began to ask themselves if there are any people on Earth who didn’t leave the spot where it’s thought Homo sapiens evolved. Austin Reynolds declared:
From a scientific point of view, maybe the only people that you could consider not to be immigrants would be some Khoe-San-speaking groups in southern Africa.
As Reynolds also explained, the designation Khoe-San refers to African communities from the areas of Botswana, Angola, Namibia and South Africa. They speak similar languages with distinctive clicking consonants. There are two reasons to believe the Khoe-San groups never migrated at all: they feature high genetic diversity and they live on a territory that has the highest chances to be hosting the very first humans in the past.
However, Reynolds admits that nobody can say for sure where did the first humans evolve. Other researchers are placing their bets on western Africa for that matter, others on eastern Africa, and so on. Scientists haven’t gathered enough archaeological evidence to be completely sure just where our earliest ancestors emerged.
Mark Stoneking, who is a molecular geneticist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, declared for Live Science:
People have always been on the move,
All human populations have been in contact with others.
The statements also include the Khoe-San groups, Stoneking said, adding that there’s evidence in their genes, cultures and languages.
