The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey by Spencer Wells Page A

because some families aren’t lucky enough to have had girls. By the time we reach the present century we are left with only one surviving recipe –
la bouillabaisse profonde.
Why did this one survive? By chance – the other families simply didn’t have girls at some point in the past, and their recipes blew away with the
mistral
. Looking at the village today, we might be a little disappointed at its lack of culinary diversity. How can they all eat the same fish soup?
    Of course, in the real world, no one transmits a recipe from one generation to the next without modifying it slightly to fit her own tastes. An extra clove of garlic here, a bit more thyme there, and
voilà
! – a bespoke variation on the
matrimoine
. Over time, these variations on a theme will produce their own diversity in the soup bowls – but the recipe extinction continues none the less. If we look at the bespoke village today we see a remarkable diversity of recipes – but they can
still
be traced back to a single common ancestor in the eighteenth century, thanks to Ock the Knife. This is the secret of Mitochondrial Eve.
    The results from the 1987 study by Cann and her colleagues were followed up by a more detailed analysis a few years later, and both studies pointed out two important facts: that human mitochondrial diversity had been generated within the past 200,000 years, and that the stone had dropped in Africa. So, in a very short period of time – at least in evolutionary terms – humans had spread out of Africa topopulate the rest of the world. There were some technical objections to the statistical analysis in the papers, but more extensive recent studies of mitochondrial DNA have confirmed and extended the conclusions of the original analysis. We all have an African great-great … grandmother who lived approximately 150,000 years ago.
    Darwin, in his 1871 book on human evolution
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
, had noted that ‘in each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.’ In some ways this statement is incredibly far-sighted, since most nineteenth-century Europeans would have placed Adam and Eve in Europe or Asia. In other ways it is rather trivial, since apes originated in Africa around 23 million years ago, so if we go back far enough we are eventually bound to encounter our ancestors in this continent. The key is to give a date – and this is why the genetic results were so revolutionary.
    Anthropologists such as Carleton Coon had argued for the origin of human races through a process of separate speciation events from ape-like ancestors in many parts of the world. This hypothesis became known as multiregionalism, and it persists in some anthropological circles even today. The basic idea is that ancient hominid, or humanlike, species migrated out of Africa over the course of the past couple of million years or so, establishing themselves in east Asia very early on, and then evolving
in situ
into modern-day humans – in the process creating the races identified by Coon. To understand why this theory was so widely accepted, we need to leave aside DNA for a while and rummage around in some old bones.
Dutch courage
    Linnaeus named our species
Homo sapiens
, Latin for ‘wise man’, because of our uniquely well-developed intellect. Since the nineteenth century, however, it has been known that other hominid species existedin the past. In 1856, for instance, a skull was discovered in the Neander Valley of western Germany. In pre-Darwinian Europe the bones were originally thought to be the remains of a malformed modern human, but it was later found to be a