Professor Sykes discusses ancestral descent

Teacher:
How similar and how different are we from our ancestors?

Professor Sykes:
Everyone that lives either in Europe, or America, or Asia, or Polynesia, or Australia, are all related to one another and have a common ancestor, certainly as far as M-DNA is concerned, living roughly something like maybe a hundred thousand years ago at the very most. And this is very, very recent in evolutionary times.

And that woman, because it was just one woman, who lived a hundred thousand years ago - she lived in Africa too - and it was her descendants that spread out into Europe and into Asia, and ultimately to America, to South East Asia, to Polynesia and to Australia. And she was just one woman - I've given her a name, Lara, and she was one woman from Africa.

There are another twelve women in Africa whose descendents didn't leave Africa, they stayed in Africa. But you could clearly see, reconstructing this family tree, that we all (all of us that don't live in Africa) are really Africans in exile if you like. We've left Africa not all that long ago. Within Africa, again, we all go back. Perhaps another hundred thousand years to the common ancestor, the maternal common ancestor, of everyone on the planet who lived about 150 to 200 thousand years ago.