DNA helps map 100,000 years of human migration

And they trace it to...drum roll please...Ethiopia.

From an article in the LA Times:

Scrutinizing the DNA of 938 people from 51 distinct populations around the world, geneticists have created a detailed map of how humans spread from their home base in sub-Saharan Africa to populate the farthest reaches of the globe in the past 100,000 years.

The pattern of genetic mutations, to be published today in the journal Science, offers striking evidence that an ancient band of explorers left what is now Ethiopia and -- along with their descendants -- went on to colonize North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, southern and central Asia, Australia and its surrounding islands, the Americas and East Asia. A second analysis based on some of the same DNA samples corroborated the results. Those findings, published Thursday in the journal Nature, demonstrated that the greater the geographic distance between a population and its African ancestors, the more changes had accumulated in its genes.

For the full article, please click here.