Our Distance From Africa Predicts Our Number Of Harmful Genes

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

A grass hut in the Kalahari Desert. Brenna M. Henn

Modern humans dispersed out of Africa and expanded into multiple continents around 50,000 years ago. Researchers studying the genetic impact of our species’ expansion reveal that the distance from sub-Saharan Africa can help predict the number of deleterious mutations in a genome. The findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.