by Robert Taylor

Created on: May 18, 2009   Last Updated: June 02, 2009

The Tishkoff Study Confirms the Centrality of Africa in All People

The recently released groundbreaking genetic study by Sarah Tishkoff and her team of African, American and European researchers confirms and/or establishes three essential things about Africans, African-Americans and their evolutionary relationships with the rest of the populations of the world.

First of all, there can now be no doubt that approximately 200,000 years ago the human race had its origins in Africa. The true Adam and Eve were Black. This fact has been widely accepted in the scientific community for some time. But thanks to the Tishkoff team we can now pinpoint the place of origin to Southern Africa - near the current-day South African-Namibian border. From there, ancient Africans migrated northeast until they reached roughly what is current-day Ethiopia.

From Ethiopia - at a point near the middle of the Red Sea - some of these early humans began leaving the African continent to populate the Middle East and Asia and then gradually spread next to Europe and finally to the Americas - probably across a land bridge which no longer exists.

Fundamentally, this confirms that all people on the planet Earth are ultimately of African ancestry - from the darkest-skinned person in the Congo to the lightest-skinned person in Sweden. Or as one of the researchers, Muntaser Ibrahim of the department of molecular biology at the University of Khartoum in the Sudan phrased it, "Everybody's history is part of African history because everybody came out of Africa."

This conclusion is based on the scientific theory that the highest levels of genetic diversity are to be found in the populations which have been on Earth the longest because they have had the longest time to evolve and experience genetic changes. The study found that Africans are the most genetically diverse people on the planet and are thus the oldest or original people. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, explains, "Given the fact that modern humans arose in Africa, they [Africans] have had time to accumulate dramatic [genetic] changes."

Second, the ten-year study also confirms the diversity (and implied vitality) of African Americans. The research covered 121 African populations, 60 non-African populations and four African American populations in Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and North Carolina. The conclusion: The genes which populate the bodies of the average American Black come from

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