DNA proves Charles Darwin was right

By Aaron Findlay From: The Australian February 05, 2010

Ancestors left Africa 45,000 years ago
Darwin “would have been delighted”
Proves his “wild” theories

CHARLES Darwin may have been prone to the odd wild theory, but even he probably never imagined that DNA technology could help determine who his ancient ancestors were.

However, 200 years after his birth, the technology seems to have achieved just that, with an experiment involving his great-great-grandson apparently revealing that the family’s ancestors left Africa about 45,000 years ago, The Australian reported.

Chris Darwin, 48, took a cheek swab test analysing his Y chromosome, with the test revealing that he, and therefore his paternal great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin, are from the Haplogroup R1B, one of the most common European male lineages.

Mr Darwin, a tour guide from the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, said his great-great-grandfather would have been both delighted and relieved, given he had gone “out on a limb” with his assertions that Africa was the “cradle of humankind”.

“When you look at it, he made some really wild statements – I mean, saying we’re all from Africa, he simply looked at the great apes around the world and considered that the similarities between the chimpanzees and the gorillas were greater with us than the similarities with the orangutans,” he said.

“And he then said we must be from Africa – but that is a pretty wild shot in the dark so he was really going out on a limb.”

Mr Darwin said the quest to find out what we are and where we come from was just as important as the work that went into the now acknowledged theory that Earth was not the centre of the universe.

” At some stage surely, don’t we need to decide what we are? Are we an image of a god or are we an ape from Africa?” he said.

The experiment, known as The Genographic Project, is a research partnership between National Geographic and IBM with field support from the Waitt Family Foundation.

The project’s test results show Mr Darwin’s paternal ancestors would have migrated from northeast Africa to the Middle East or North Africa about 45,000 years ago.

Men belonging to Haplogroup R1B are direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon people who, beginning 30,000 years ago, dominated the human expansion into Europe and heralded the demise of the Neanderthal species.

Read more at The Australian.

DNAWellnessinfo.com Resource: http://www.news.com.au/national/dna-proves-charles-darwin-was-right/story-e6frfkvr-1225827108398