Did One Small African Tribe Populate the World?

New genetic research is leading a group of geneticists and archaeologists to speculate that a small African tribe that crossed the Red Sea some 70,000 years ago is responsible for the spread of human beings around the globe.

“What you can see from the DNA of all non-Africans is that they all belong to one tiny African branch that came across the Red Sea,” says Oxford University geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer. “If it was easy to get out of Africa we would have seen multiple African lineages in the DNA of non-Africans but that there was only one successful exit suggests it must have been very tough to get out.”

The recent genetic research indicates that it was not until around 70,000 years ago that humans were able to take advantage of falling sea levels to cross into Arabia at the mouth of the Red Sea, and from there to spread along the Arabian coast as a prelude to colonizing the rest of the world.

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