Aboriginal genome rewrites history of human migration - Telegraph: Genetic information extracted from the lock of hair, which was donated by a young Aboriginal man to a British anthropologist in the 1920s, suggests that instead of leaving Africa in one single migratory movement, humans departed in two separate waves.
An international team of scientists used DNA within the hair to sequence the Aboriginal genome for the first time.
Their results revealed that the man was directly descended from a migration out of Africa into Asia that took place about 70,000 years ago.
The researchers believe this proves that Aborigines were the first group to separate from other modern humans.
Their remarkable findings, published in the journal Science, suggest that modern Aborigines moved out of Africa 24,000 years earlier than the humans who went on to form the populations of Asia and Europe, challenging current theories of a single phase of dispersal from Africa.
