Interviewee: Steve Olson. Author Steve Olson talks about the stable and isolated history of the San people of Southern Africa, who are sometimes known as "Bushmen." (DNAi Location: Applications > Human origins > Gene genealogy > Tracing ancestries > An ancient lineage: the San)

The Bushmen are interesting to geneticists because they have very old haplotypes. Now just as many generations separate the Bushmen from our common ancestors, as separate all of us from our common ancestors. So they're not different in that respect, but they're different in that they may be the descendants of one of the first populations of modern humans to move away from, from where we think the homeland of modern humans was, in eastern Africa. They may have moved down to southern Africa, and then remained in that area more or less as a group for much of the time since then. So their genes can tell, still tell us some very important things about these first stages of, of the history of modern humans.

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