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Saturday, February 23, 2008

Geographic Genetic Chart


From Washington Post. Click to Enlarge

The Washington Post features an article with the above chart about genetic studies that "map" out humanity's diversity. The chart's information backs up the "Out of Africa" theory of human migration with a center point near present-day Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The chart shows the mixture of origins for ethnic groups based on a sample population's DNA. No real surprises but still neat to look at. Russians have some Central Asian pro-Catholicgauzes. Africans are "pure." The information shows the Middle East to be the ancient melting pot with various groups intermixing.

One neat thing to see in future research is to see if the "average" American has more ethnic genetic mixtures than the average Middle Easterner. I assume the United States has more ethnic groups than much of the Middle East but I cannot say how well intermixed America's population is.

1 comment:

Dan tdaxp said...

I wonder if the Middle East is a melting pot, or the center of a demographic diffusion into Europe and Central Asia... or both. Hmm... perhaps we will soon know!