Professor Sykes discusses how M-DNA can connect humans back to just one African woman

Professor Sykes:
Individually we have so many genes that we're all identical twins apart. We're all genetically unique.

However, when you look at those genes one by one (and we'll take M-DNA as the example), our M-DNA when you compare one person's with another is really pretty similar. M-DNA does change with time and that's why we're able to say things about genetics, we're able to say things about how long ago certain things happened. But it changes very, very slowly. So the M-DNA that we have in our bodies now, and we all have it, has come down from our ancestors and it really hasn't changed much at all over the past, let's say, ten thousand years, hardly changed at all - it will be almost identical with our ancestors of ten thousand years ago and very, very similar to our ancestors of a hundred thousand years ago.

And if you go back a hundred thousand years, everyone on the face of the planet, our ancestors, if we trace them back that far to ultimately come from Africa. And you can connect up with M-DNA the people from everywhere and connect them back to just one woman, incredibly, who lived in Africa about a 150 thousand years ago. And part of the research that I've been involved in over the past ten years has been to try and map out this sort of gigantic family tree. And certainly that's what it shows without any doubt at all.