Are George Bush And Saddam Hussein Related?

Could George W Bush and Saddam Hussein be related? According to controversial geneticist Dr Spencer Wells the answer is yes.

His research and theories are explained in Journey of Man, premiering on DStv's National Geographic Channel on December 15 at 10pm.

In the programme Wells says that all human beings are related in a single brotherhood of man.

Forget everything you know about family and everything you think you know about race. New genetic evidence, based on thousands of blood samples taken across the world, shows that 50 000 years ago humans numbered only 10 000 and they lived in Africa. A small band of them left and populated every inch of the globe.

'Concepts of race are not only socially divisive but scientifically wrong' We are all their children. We are all related.

"Everyone all over the world, we're all literally African under the skin. Brothers and sisters separated by a mere 2 000 generations. Old-fashioned concepts of race are not only socially divisive but scientifically wrong," says Wells.

Modern air travel, increasing immigration and swelling populations are breeding a worldwide monoculture that threatens once-isolated cultures.

The effect is a loss of distinct genetic mutations or markers that outline the path of human history. It is these markers that Wells relies upon to study the migratory patterns of our ancestors. As genetic paths merge, the larger human DNA picture blurs.

In the two-hour documentary special, Wells takes a journey himself, relating our own ancestors' journey to populate the planet. He guides viewers through a genetic detective story that takes him out of Africa and around the world to unlock clues, hidden in blood, that trace humanity's path and rewrite our family tree.

'We know where we come from, we know about creation, we know we come from here' Wells discovers his scientific version of creation is not going to be popular with everybody. "Tradition rarely sits well with cutting edge science," he says.

Wells, who studied the Y-chromosome as it contains more reliable DNA data, begins his trip in Africa. There he meets the Bushmen, descended from our earliest human ancestors. Their DNA can be traced back some 60 000 years, indicating they are the oldest tribe in the world.

The plot thickens when he meets Australian aborigines who bluntly reject his ideas. Says one: "We know where we come from, we know about creation, we know we come from here."

Wells has to show how they made the trek from Africa to Australia, despite the lack of archaeological evidence anywhere along the path. Armed with a simple blood-testing kit and a powerful theory, Wells finds a vital clue in a drop of blood in an isolated village in India.

Wells can also piece together how Europeans are connected to the human family tree. In Central Asia the population multiplied for thousands of years before spawning parties of travellers that populated the rest of the world. All the Central Asian descendants around the globe, including Europeans, have the DNA from a single Central Asian man who lived there more than 35 000 years ago.

This ancestral male did more than just leave descendants in Europe. About 20 000 years ago a second wave of Central Asians left to move north past the Arctic Circle. Wells's genetic research says that humans survived in the Arctic tundra for thousands of years, before a small band ventured across a land bridge to Alaska - where their descendants spent another couple of thousand years before the Ice Age began to reverse, and they could finally walk south into the warmer climates of the Americas.

Wells caps off his journey in a London photographic studio with a group of beautiful fashion models from all corners or the globe. Are they related? Definitely.

Fossil challenge to Africa theory

Bone fragments were examined for ancient DNA

Australian scientists say analysis of the oldest DNA ever taken from skeletal remains challenges the theory that all modern humans can trace their recent ancestry to Africa.

What our evidence shows is that the situation is much more complicated than any of these supporters of Out of Africa would have imagined

Dr Alan Thorne, Australian National University The study is based on the 60,000-year-old so-called Mungo Man skeleton, which was unearthed in New South Wales in 1974, and nine other anatomically modern Australian individuals who lived 8-15,000 years ago.

The Australian National University team looked at the DNA found in the mitochondria of these ancient people's cells. mtDNA, as it is known, is inherited only from females and also mutates - errors appear - at a steady rate, meaning it can be used as a "molecular clock" to investigate human history.

Mungo Man

Discovered at Lake Mungo in far west NSW in 1974 Had been covered in red ochre during a burial ritual Hands were interlocked and positioned over the penis Found in same area as cremated remains of female skeleton known by local Aborigines as Mungo Lady

Recent lab studies of this type have suggested that our most recent common ancestor lived less than 200,000 years ago in Africa.

But the Australian researchers contend that the DNA sequences isolated from Mungo Man's bones show him to have a genetic lineage that is both older and distinct from this line.

Given the undoubted modern appearance of Mungo Man, they argue, major doubt must now be cast on the so-called "Out of Africa" hypothesis in which all living people are said to be descended from a group of modern humans who left their African homeland no earlier than about 120,000 years ago.

Alternative explanation

"What our evidence shows is that the situation is much more complicated than any of these supporters of Out of Africa would have imagined," lead researcher Dr Alan Thorne said.

Dating has put the age of the Mungo Man remains at between 56,000 and 68,000 years

"They were arguing that because the earliest forms of this particular genetic sequence in living people was found in Africa, that meant that all people must have come from Africa.

"Well, logically, that's not true anymore because we now have an older form of indisputably modern human that comes out of Australia."

Dr Thorne, whose team have published their research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a proponent of the alternative, multi-regional explanation for the emergence of modern humans.

This suggests that modern humans arose simultaneously in Africa, Europe and Asia from one of our predecessors, Homo erectus, who left Africa more that 1.5 million years ago.

"Modern humans didn't just come from one area, they came from all areas," Dr Thorne said. "We assert that when people began to leave Africa about two million years ago, they were the ancestors of all modern people and we don't think modern humanity emerged from one place later on.

European studies

"We simply say that here we have a form much older than anything found in Africa and there's no evidence that it, or the skeletal anatomy of the fossil that it comes from, ever had anything to do with Africa. In fact, the skeleton looks very much like slightly earlier fossils that we know were in China."

Dr Alan Thorne supports the multi-regional explanation for the emergence of modern humans

But Out of Africa supporters are not about to let go of their beliefs because of the Australian research. Professor Chris Stringer, from the Natural History Museum in London, UK, said that, given experience with European fossils, there was some doubt over whether DNA analysis of such old samples was reliable. And he said the research community would want to see the work repeated in other labs before major conclusions were drawn from the Australian research.

But even assuming the DNA sequences were correct, Professor Stringer said it could just mean that there was much more genetic diversity in the past than was previously realised.

There is no evidence here that the ancestry of these Australian fossils goes back a million or two million years

Prof Chris Stringer, Natural History Museum "What it says is that some of that genetic diversity has been lost today," he told BBC News Online. "This sequence could have been in Australia and in Africa. In other words, it might have been in Africa 200,000 years ago, [it] came out with some of the African people and then got lost.

"There is no evidence here that the ancestry of these Australian fossils goes back a million or two million years, which is the multi-regional prediction."

(Sorry Cyber, I'm with the Mungo Clan and it is our custom to loan only to relatives.)

SCIENCE, Vol. 263, 2/4/94, p. 611-612

Did Early Humans Reach Siberia 500,000 Years Ago?

by Virginia Morell

Twelve years ago, while excavating in northern Siberia, archeologists Yuri A. Mochanov and his wife, Svetlana Fedoseeva of the Russian Academy of Sciences, came upon a few unprepossessing rocks. That might not sound like much, but to Mochanov those rocks looked like very early stone tools, tools with which he could construct a new path for human evolution--a path that began in the cold north, rather than on the warm plains of Africa as almost all his col leagues believed.

To those colleagues, however, the find simply looked like unprepossessing rocks. But now, thanks to a reexamination of the material and high-tech geologic dating methods, those skeptics are beginning to think that while Mochanov may not rewrite prehistory completely, he may be able to revise a chapter about Homo erectus, a human ancestor who lived from approximately 1.7 million years to 200,000 years ago.

The rocks in question were discovered as the two Russians unearthed a 3000 to 4000-year-old tomb at the Diring-Yuriakh (Deep Creek) site on the Lena River. Below the tomb they spotted a scattering of crudely shaped stone tools. Mochanov and Fedoseeva had seen similar tools before, but they came from East Africa, and they were 2.4 million years old, the earliest known tools made by human ancestors. At the time, it was thought that the earliest human occupation of Siberia took place 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. "I was stunned," Mochanov recalls. "Nothing like this had ever been found in Siberia and I thought, 'This is impossible.'"

Over the next several years, his incredulity vanished as he amassed more than 4000 quartzite artifacts, primarily anvil stones, flakes, and choppers. And based on the simi- larities between the Siberian and African tools, as well as preliminary studies that dated the site at 3 million years of age, Mochanov proposed a northern Russian genesis for humanity, beginning at that time.

That didn't sit at all well with his colleagues, who thought Diring's geology and dates were far too shaky to hold up a theory that contradicted the abundant and well- accepted evidence pointing to African origins. To make matters worse for Mochanov, few archeologists accepted the artifacts as tools, believing instead that the quartzite cobbles could have been chipped by some geological process. "The site needs to be looked at with a properly jaundiced eye," says William Kimbel, a paleoanthropologist at the Institute for Human Origins in Berkeley. Lately, however, the jaundiced eyes are beginning to open wide. For the past month, Mochanov and Fedoseeva have been barnstorming the United States, showing their artifacts to experts at Oregon State and the Smithsonian Institution, among other places. Many of these scientists had never seen the tools firsthand and many of them are impressed. And some new dating studies using a technique called thermolumines- cence (TL) suggest that the artifacts may be at least 500,000 years old. That's a far cry from Mochanov's original claim, but still old enough to make former skeptics sit up and take notice.

"I would have been excited if the tools were only 50,000 years old," says one recent convert, Dennis Stanford, chairman of the anthropology department at the Smithsonian. "But 500,000 years opens up a Pandora's box of possibilities." The date is within the time period of erectus, and one of those possibilities is that erectus could have pushed much further north than previously believed (the next most northern erectus site is 2500 kilometers south of Diring, in China). It's also possible that early humans erectus descendants could have pushed from Siberia through Beringia and into America long before the currently accepted colonization date of around 14,000 years ago (see Report in this issue, p. 660).

The key to this Pandora's box is an ongoing series of studies by Michael Waters, a geoarcheologist at Texas A & M University, whom the National Geographic Society sent to Diring to help Mochanov evaluate the site. Waters confirmed that the artifacts lay in windblown quartzite sand deposits, which are well-suited for TL dating. This technique measures time by counting the number of stray electrons trapped in minerals, an entrapment that takes place at a steady rate. Although a relatively new--and still controversial--method, TL is the only game in town at sites such as Diring, where there are neither fossilized animal remains that might be correlated with those from another securely dated site nor volcanic ash deposits for potassium-argon dating. The sediment samples Waters collected at Diring were dated by geochronologists Steve Forman and James Pierson at Ohio State University.

But the TL dates are not the only evidence that is beginning to shift the consensus on the Diring site. It's also the tools themselves. Mochanov has unearthed 33 areas marked by anvil stones, quartzite flakes, and, in some cases, the quartzite cobble from which the flakes were chipped; often the flakes can be refitted onto the cobbles. These elements, all definitive signs of human activity, convinced Rick Potts, a Smithsonian archeologist and expert on early tools, that he was looking at hominid handiwork and not just randomly broken rocks.

"The Diring artifacts are very, very simple one-step tools," explains Potts, who had only heard sketchy details about the site until Mochanov's visit. "All they were basi- cally doing was smashing one rock with another, just to get a few pieces off That's why the tools look very rough and crude--I think Diring was their quarry site." Perhaps, Potts speculates, the inhabitants broke the rocks into smaller pieces that were easier to hold, then carried these to other sites where they may have fashioned more elaborate tools. If human ancestors did live at a site that's just below the Arctic Circle, "it implies a range of behaviors and adaptations that we have never given Homo erectus credit for, from making mitts and boots, to controlling fire and having winter survival strategies," says Waters. Until Mochanov's discovery, no one had found any signs of erectus any farther north in Asia than Zhoukoudian, the huge limestone cave in central China used by the famous "Peking Man" nearly 500,000 years ago. "What Mochanov may be seeing at Diring is part of a south-north migration pattern," suggests Robert E. Ackerman, an archeologist at Washington State University in Pullman, who visited Diring 4 years ago. "Perhaps this is part of a movement north out of China during a warming trend." However, scientists have little data about the paleoclimate of Siberia, and there is as yet no way of knowing how cold or warm the Diring peoples' environment really was. Waters suspects the site is at a high enough latitude that, even during a warm interglacial period, the climate would be similar to the climate today-- and that can be chilly indeed. At Yakutsk, just north of Diring, the mercury falls as low as -45 degrees Farenheit in January.

The ability to cope with cold at that time in human prehistory also figures in the peopling of the Americas. "For those who've wanted to see an earlier date for the peopling of the Americas this [500,000-year-old] date is a cause for celebration," says Stanford. He notes that critics have always argued that people did not have sophisticated enough technologies to survive in the Arctic until very recently. "But if people were dealing with the cold that far north in Siberia 500,000 years ago, then a little bitty ice age like the Wisconsin isn't going to stop you from getting to America," he says.

No one, however, is going to push Diring as evidence for early American pilgrims until the twin issues of the environment and dating are much more settled. Mochanov has found no erectus fossils, which would clinch the case for the site as an erectus habitat, or animal fossils, which would go a long way toward clearing up questions about just how cold it was back then. "Those are the kinds of questions that have to be answered before we can explain the Diring peoples' behavior," says Potts. "We need to know what the survival strategies were of other animals in the area. If they were all cold weather-adapted, then you'd have to say these hominids made a real breakthrough--one that no others were doing."

As for the 500,000-year-old date, there is still at least one scientist who is dissatisfied with it--Mochanov. He doesn't think it is old enough, and he is still sticking to his 3-million-year-old claim. "That is preliminary work," he says of the TL date, adding that he wants to wait for Waters' and Forman's final report, which is due by the end of this summer. "If we find we have a mistake [with the earlier date]," says Mochanov, "then we will correct it." At least his North American colleagues have already begun to correct their notion that Diring is a dud.

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