All non-Africans are closely related to one another, the studies found, and they all branch from a genetic tree rooted in Africa. They picked out 148 populations to sample, mostly in Europe and Asia, with a few genomes from Africa and Australia. The new findings indicate that our ancestors already had evolved behaviors seen in living humans, such as language, 200,000 years ago. Working with a separate set of genomes, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues came to much the same conclusion. But in Papua New Guinea, Dr. Metspalu and his colleagues found, the story was a little different.

Source: New York Times September 21, 2016 17:03 UTC