The Ancient Humans Who Never Left Africa

Somewhere in the Kalahari Desert right now, a woman is digging up roots with a sharpened stick — exactly the way her ancestors have done it every single day for 150,000 years. While the rest of humanity built Rome, crossed oceans, split the atom, and reached the moon, her family never left this exact place. They are the oldest continuous human population on Earth. ───────────────────────────────────── In 1987, scientists tracing human DNA backward through time discovered that every person alive today shares one common female ancestor — "Mitochondrial Eve" — who lived in Africa roughly 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Her closest living descendants are the San people of southern Africa. In 2009, geneticist Sarah Tishkoff found something that broke every assumption about human evolution: the San carry more genetic diversity within their single population than all of Europe, Asia, North America, and South America — combined. ───────────────────────────────────── 70,000 years ago, a small group of a few thousand people walked out of Africa. Every non-African human alive today — every European, every Asian, every Native American — descends from that one group. The San were here before they left. They were here when Rome rose. They were here when Rome fell. Continuous. Unbroken. In the same land. For 150,000 years. This video is about what "progress" actually means — and about a people the world is trying to erase from the very land that made human civilization possible in the first place. ───────────────────────────────────── They are not a remnant of what humans used to be. They are what humans have always been. ───────────────────────────────────── Sources: • Cann, R.L., Stoneking, M., Wilson, A.C. (1987). Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Nature. • Tishkoff, S.A. et al. (2009). The genetic structure and history of Africans and African Americans. Science. • Schlebusch, C.M. et al. (2017). Southern African ancient genomes estimate modern human divergence to 350,000 to 260,000 years ago. Science. • Survival International — Central Kalahari Game Reserve eviction records ───────────────────────────────────── #sanpeople #ancienthumans #humanevolution #anthropology #genetics