Oldest African DNA Offers Rare Window Into Past

Mount Hora in Malawi, where researcher Jessica Thompson obtained the oldest African DNA ever successfully sequenced. (Credit Jessica Thompson/Emory University) A great irony about Africa is that, even though it's the birthplace of our species, we know almost nothing about the prehistoric populations who lived there: the bands of hunter gatherers who moved across the massive continent, interacting with and sometimes replacing other groups. Today that changes. Thanks to new research that includes the oldest African DNA ever successfully read, we're seeing Africa's prehistory like never before. Archaeologists and paleogeneticists are finally starting to fill in some crucial gaps about the human story. Imagine you're an archaeologist, specifically a paleolithic archaeologist who studies the earliest chapters of our story, before cities or iron or agriculture, and you're focused on Africa, which is, after all, where all of us can trace back our ancestry. (Yes, all of us.) Imagine what it's ...