The amount of jewels in this audiobook is astounding. This is just one.
“In 1987 the Berkeley team led by the late Alan Wilson did an analysis of mitochondrial DNA from 147 individuals. And declared that the rise of anatomically modern humans occurred in Africa within the last 140,000 years, and that all present day humans are descended from that population. It was a serious blow to the multi-regionalists, but then people began to look a little more closely at the data. One of the most extraordinary points, almost too extraordinary to credit really, was that the Africans used in the study were actually African Americans whose genes had obviously been subjected to considerable mediation in the past few hundred years. Doubts also soon emerged about the assumed rates of mutations. By 1992 the study was largely discredited, but the techniques of genetic analysis continued to be refined.” – Excerpt from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson – Full Audiobook (18:20:50.6 – 18:21:50.6)
Transcribed by Hakeem Bey.