Tracing Our Genetic Mutations

About the Book

In Central West Africa over a quarter of a million years ago, mankind evolved to become the very first known genetically and anatomically modern humans—Homo sapiens. One hundred forty thousand years ago, some of these modern humans migrated to the Great Rift Valley and Ethiopia, where almost all non-African people living today originated. More than seventy thousand years ago, some of their descendants moved across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula, where 90 percent of the world’s existing non-African population originated. Many thousands of years later, some of these hunter-gatherers moved north. Because of climate change, their black skin changed to the olive brown of the Middle East, and some of them later migrated to the Caucasus and the Southern Eurasian Steppe grasslands. A few went east to Siberia and Northern Asia and eventually to the Americas, mutations changing their bodily features as they went. Others moved east and south, to India and Australasia. Forty thousand years ago, after moving farther north to the vast colder Northern Eurasian Steppes, mutations again took place, with the people adapting to the climate by changing their hair, skin, and eye color to a lighter hue. My own paternal haplogroup eventually moved west from the Eurasian Steppes to the fjords of Norway, becoming Viking warriors who raided the British Isles. They eventually settled here in the eleventh century with the family name Manningham, changing to Glover in the seventeenth century. My maternal ancestors moved from being some of the first farmers in Anatolia to become the Anglo-Saxons in North West Europe who invaded and settled in South East England over 1,400 years ago. Over the centuries, some members of these families settled in the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, helping to build these new countries to what they are today. Some towns and cities are named after them. If you are a member of one of these now-very-wide families or simply interested in the early history of mankind, I hope you will find this little book of interest. —Richard Donovan Glover

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