精读第9899期原文.pdfVIP

The secret of the origin of human beings IMAGINE visiting a tourist attraction in any major world city. There are people from all over – a Nigerian family, a Chinese couple, a German school party, and more. They all look very different from one another, which isn’t surprising given that their ancestors have lived in far-flung parts of the world for generations. Yet, everyone alive today can trace their origins back to Africa, so there must have been a time when such physical differences didn’t exist, right? Actually, no. In fact, if you were to travel back to the very beginnings of our species and select a random group of humans, they would look unlike anyone living today in Africa or elsewhere. What’s more, they would show extraordinary physical variation – greatly exceeding that in modern human populations. Far from becoming more diverse as we have adapted to life in different parts of the planet, Homo sapiens is more homogeneous today than our ancestors were. This is a real puzzle. It simply doesn’t fit with the long-held idea that we arose from a single population in a corner of East Africa. In fact, mounting evidence from fossils, archaeological remains and genetic analysis points in a new direction. Now researchers, including myself, are trying to work out what it all means: why our African forebears were so physically different from each other, and how our species lost the huge variety it once had. The textbook story of our origins has seemingly solid foundations. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it became possible to sequence the DNA in mitochondria. These tiny structures, which power our cells, are inherited solely from our mothers. So, by comparing the genetic variation in people living today, it was possible to track back to the common female ancestor of us all. Sometimes referred to as “Mitochondrial Eve”, although not necessarily a single person, she lived in Afr