Yemen Observer: http://www.yobserver.com
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Written By: Thuria Ghaleb
Article Date: Dec 2, 2008 - 4:20:20 AM
As recently as 10 years ago, anthropologists believed the first anatomically modern humans moved northward from east Africa across the Sinai Peninsula and from there into Asia and Europe.
But evidence is gathering that the route may have in fact been more southerly. Located at the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula with just a sliver of the Red Sea separating it from Africa, Yemen could be ground zero — the first place migrating people would have set foot as they left the Horn of Africa, a new research found.
The research findings were recently reviewed in a special lecture conducted in the Yemeni Center for Historical Studies and Future Strategies (Manarat) on November 25 by Dr. Ali al-Meeri, vice-dean of student affairs and professor of biochemistry at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Science of Sana’a University.
“The research is an extract of many studies conducted during the last 15 years. It is considered the most recent scientific research in the investigation of human history through the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and hereditary genes,” said Dr. al-Meeri, who also participated in the research. He accompanied the anthropologists’ team throughout Yemen to collect biological samples.
The team of anthropologists gathered 550 samples from throughout Yemen during six weeks in April 2007 to represent geographic, ethnic and linguistic diversity. This research methodology was based on the assumption that this will give them the complete genetic representation of the people in Yemen and capture their full evolutionary history.
“For the people who live in this hot, rugged land, the matter is of major cultural significance. Yemen is one of the oldest centers of civilization in the world, dating back more than 12,000 years,” wrote Connie Mulligan who leads this research in a report titled “Out of Africa” from the Office of Research Publications. “It makes sense that when humans as a group took their first steps outside of Africa, their path would have taken them here.”
Mulligan, who is also an associate professor of anthropology and assistant director of the UF Genetics Institute, has long been interested in tracking the movement of people to determine how the Earth came to be populated. But she doesn’t excavate archeological sites, sift through layers of geologic strata, or carbon-date fossils. “Population geneticists like me use sensitive genetic tests to look at DNA sequences in modern populations, with the idea that these sequences were forged by an accumulation of events in the distant past.”
“No shovels or heavy lifting is required. All that’s necessary is to collect spots of blood and saliva from individual volunteers — relatively easy to do in concept, but something altogether more challenging in practice,” she wrote.
According to what Mulligan wrote in her report, the initial results show that Yemeni populations do indeed share many old genes and nuclear lineages with African populations as well as many lineages found outside of Africa. This supports the idea of an ancient migration out of African into Yemen.
The next question is, do the non-African lineages originate in Yemen, or do they represent back-migration to Yemen? Sophisticated simulation analyses suggest that Yemeni populations may have been formed by an ancient migration out of Africa followed by subsequent gene flow from both Africa and Asia, which is completely consistent with the initial proposal of a migration of anatomically modern humans out of Africa along a southern route.
“We also have data suggesting that a genetically distinct population common in Europe may have originally evolved in Yemen prior to its expansion throughout Eurasia. We currently have three papers on these results in the works,” she wrote.