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LOS ANGELES — The largest genetic analysis of African populations to date suggests that modern humans originated in southern African about 60,000 years ago, not eastern Africa as is now commonly thought, researchers said Monday.
A team from Stanford University found that the Bushmen hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert who speak one of the Khoisan languages characterized by the presence of clicking consonants have the greatest genetic diversity in their DNA of any people in Africa — and, indeed, the world.
High genetic diversity is generally accepted as a mark of old age of a population. The new data were reported online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
