Sacred Ancestors

Once again with all that ancestral hanky-panky. It was once thought to be a good model, simple, linearly progressive, the "Out of Africa" migration; out of Olduvai, across the Indian subcontinent, eastwards to the islands big and small and upwards through Siberia to Bering to eventually Patagonia. You could draw it with an arrow, practically.  Only one problem, or actually many, the genetics don't support this anymore.

One of only two known remains of the Denisovan girl, this molar and a  phalange (finger bone).

"These days you never know where research related to modern human origins will be reported and published. Here is a presentation from the Critical Assessment of Massive Data Analysis (CAMDA) conference held in Long Beach, California, on July 13-14, 2012. The team focused on chromosome 1 and used a Korean panel to identify 107,473 haplotypes in Africans, 9,554 in Europeans and 6,933 in Asians. The results are preliminary but nevertheless intriguing. Despite the fact that Africans are by far the most polymorphic, it is Asian rare haplotypes that have better matches with Neandertals and Denisovans. In some cases African haplotypes have their exclusive Neandertal and Denisovan matches, which may indicate a migration from Asia to Africa." h/t Anthropogensis blog.