Stephen Oppenheimer - Science magazine paper on Out of Africa

Stephen Oppenheimer contributes to 'Science' magazine paper on 'Out of Africa'

This recent paper published in 'Science' by Vincent Macaulay and an international team of researchers including Professor Stephen Oppenheimer of Green College, Oxford, and a member of the Bradshaw Foundation Advisory Board, provides irrefutable evidence of the early timing and southern location of the only migration out of Africa to succeed and give rise to all modern non-African peoples.

The paper states that all non-Africans descend from a single group of humans that left Africa by a coastal route across the mouth of the Red Sea to South Asia. This disproves current theories – which argue for several successful exits via different routes and at different times, including a direct northern route to Europe 45,000 years ago.

stephen oppenheimer,
photograph byFreda Oppenheimer

The paper endorses the claims and new conclusions made by Stephen Oppenheimer 2 years ago in his 2003 book ‘Out of Eden’ [‘The Real Eve’ in the USA], the material of which was used in the Channel 4 programme of the same name, and the Discovery Channel film ‘The Real Eve’, and in the Bradshaw Foundation’s Journey of Mankind Genetic Map.

One or more exits from Africa? North .v. South

A commonly held view has been that modern humans left Africa both round the north and the south of the Red Sea in several waves to populate Europe and Asia. New analysis of genetic trees in isolated ‘relic’ populations on the trail in Southeast Asia by Oppenheimer and others now overturns that orthodoxy. The research shows that there was only a single dispersal from Africa, via a southern coastal route, across the mouth of the red Sea, through India and onward into Southeast Asia and Australasia. There was subsequently a northern offshoot from the Gulf region, leading ultimately to the settlement of the Near East and Europe, but this only occurred much later.

Stephen oppenheimer Stephen Oppenheimer

DNA Sampling Team
photograph by
Freda Oppenheimer

Semang Villagers
photograph by
Freda Oppenheimer

The key to this new and detailed story of our migration is mitochondrial DNA [mtDNA]. MtDNA passes from mother to child, each generation, unchanged, therefore every person alive on the Earth today has inherited this small collection of genes from one single great-great-great-grandmother, nearly two hundred thousand years ago. There are occasional mutations in the mtDNA molecule, enabling the tracing of migrations of people. This trail of maternal inheritance is backed up by the Y-chromosomes passed only down the male line. The mtDNA and Y trees each show only one branch coming out of Africa, implying only one exit.

The key findings in ‘OUT OF EDEN’, all now supported by the research published this week in SCIENCE, are:

There was one exodus from Africa via an earlier southern route 60 to 80 thousand years ago that led to the peopling of the rest of the planet.

Modern humans only reached Europe the long way round, via Southern Arabia, with this retarded movement into Europe taking place approximately 50,000 years ago.

Malaysian tribes provide a living link to the route pursued east after the exodus across the Red Sea, as modern humans beachcombed their way to Australia over several thousand years.

Early Europeans were not the first to learn to paint, carve, develop complex culture and speak, and do not represent a major biological advance. Evidence indicates that humans must have arrived in India already painting and fully ‘modern’.

Bradshaw Foundation