ANT 301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Homo Sapiens, Fiba Africa, Nuclear Dna
Document Summary
The head of the sperm combines with the nuclear dna in the egg. The changes that occur in mitochondrial dna are due to mutations. Discovery that the greatest variability in mitochondrial dna, was in africa. (it seems that all human populations descended from africa) The rst people (hominids) to leave africa left 1. 8 ma ago. Humans have relatively low genetic variation compared to other hominoids such as chimpanzees. The origin comes from a relatively small population. We have a pool of variants (occurring at a slow, but constant rate) Natural selection removes mutations at a rate of m/2n. What was discovered was that we are all decedents of a small population of individuals. Fossils are essentially lithi ed bones (the organic material in bones gets replaced over time as a bone fossilizes) We are able to recover dna from fossils that are tens of thousands of years old.
