Saturday Life Sciences: Of Ancient DNA -- And What It Can Tell Us... Of The Origin Stories -- Of Essentially All Modern Humans...

We have spoken before of the ancient African Nama people. Their genetic makeup appears to have been the "parent DNA" of essentially all modern humans. And it has long been known that the Jomon peoples, of about 35,000 years ago, were related to Africans, genetically -- and inhabited much of what is the modern Korean peninsula.

This new genetic sequencing confirms that what became the modern Japanese peoples also show significant admixtures of Jomon, which of course traces right back to Africa between 50,000 -- and 100,000 years ago. No one knows if the Africans travelled by foot to these peninsulas, or if they might have sailed from what becomes Eastern India, to reach the Japanese islands -- but it is clear that they were (in some measure) the progenitors of modern Japan. Here's the latest:

. . .A research team led by Jonghyun Kim and Jun Ohashi from the University of Tokyo has found that during the Yayoi and Kofun periods (300 BCE to 538 CE), the majority of immigrants to the Japanese Archipelago came from the Korean Peninsula.

Their study analyzed the complete genome of a “Yayoi” individual and found that, among the non-Japanese populations, the results showed the genetic makeup most closely resembled that of Korean populations.

Although it is widely accepted that modern Japanese populations have a dual ancestry, the discovery provides insight into the details of immigration patterns to the archipelago that had previously puzzled researchers. The findings were published today (October 14) in the Journal of Human Genetics. . . .

I mention it all. . . because with the outbreaks of Marburg, and Mpox we now see in Africa. . . we are reminded. . . we are all our brothers' -- and sisters'. . . keepers. Onward.

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