This May Literally Be… The Face — Of The Mother, Of Us All

It would now seem that a fairly small group of humans, living in a remote area between present-day South Africa and Namibia… still carry the largest portion of diverse DNA, on the planet. In fact, it is so diverse, the Nama may be the only remaining group of humans with direct and close genetic marker ties… to all living humans.

Literally, to all of us. Here’s the bit:

…[The study collected] genomes from 44 modern Nama individuals from southern Africa, an Indigenous population known to carry exceptional levels of genetic diversity compared to other modern groups….

The study model suggests the earliest population split among early humans that is detectable in contemporary populations occurred 120,000 to 135,000 years ago, after two or more weakly genetically differentiated… populations had been mixing for hundreds of thousands of years. After the population split, people still migrated between the stem populations, creating a weakly structured stem. This offers a better explanation of genetic variation among individual humans and human groups than do previous models, the authors suggest….

So, back five million years — our “mom” was Lucy, but our most modern form is probably directly linked — at about 135,000 years ago, onward… to peoples very much akin to what we call the present day Nama, on the borders of South Africa and Namibia.

We all — all humans — for a goodly portion of the last 100,000 or so years… closely resembled them, even in appearances, in all likelihood. [All of which calls into question. . . the wisdom of mistreating our mothers, as they attempt to come across our southern border. We’ve only observed the concept of “borders”, for a blink of an eye, compared to Nama timeframes.]

Indeed, consider here, how much more closely the Northern England’s “Cheddar Man” — dated at “only” about 9,000 years ago (see image at link)… resembles the Nama, than he does… the decidedly pale Brits, of today. For almost all of our time here on Earth, we have been… brown peoples. Out, smiling….

नमस्ते