Out of Africa's Eden; the Peopling of the world

"In 1988, Newsweek broke the news that everyone alive on the planet today carries DNA that can be traced back to a single woman living in Africa over 150,000 years ago. Modern humans are truly "out of Africa." But how, when, and why we left our motherland was open to question and until very recently most experts believed that many waves of ex-African migration has resulted in a gradual populating of the world." "With a synthesis of new genetic, archaeological and climate evidence, Stephen Oppenheimer challenges the orthodoxy by arguing that all modern non-Africans can be shown to have sprung from a single exodus. One migrant group of no more than a few hundred souls was forced out of its homeland by increasing salinity in the Red Sea, some 80,000 years ago, and all non-Africans today can trace their mitochondrial DNA to one woman from this group - the Out-of-Africa Eve." "The implications are immense. Until now, it has been assumed by many that Europeans were the first to learn to paint, carve, develop complex culture and even to speak. Oppenheimer shows that the structure of the genetic tree denies this." "Out of Eden traces the steps of those original colonists round the Indo-Pacific and the offshoots who headed inland. From early colonies in South Asia, their descendants pushed east to Australia in just 10,000 years; it was to be another 20,000 years before the first modern humans arrived in western Europe. And it is clear there were at least two parallel waves of migrants into America, across the Bering Strait just before the last glacial, a maximum of 18,000 years ago."--BOOK JACKET.