The data suggest more genetic distinctiveness between populations across
the continent than the previous study, says Samuel Wasser, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Anthropologists and geneticists know that populations throughout the world migrated from Africa more
than 60,000 years ago (see diagram), and that the human genome is at its most diverse in our
continent of origin, but
previous studies have only scratched the surface of African genetic diversity.