David Reich

But if you look at the archaeological evidence, it's not incredibly clear.

And if you look at the genetic evidence, we have many early branches from Eurasia and only one from Africa.

and complexity and branching in Eurasia that's sampled in the DNA record.

DNA from Denisovans, DNA from unknown archaic lineages that contributed to Denisovans, Neanderthals, and all of those are represented in the Eurasian record, not in the African record.

Part of that is the fact that ancient DNA is preserved in Eurasia.

But maybe actually there's a period when our lineage resides in Eurasia.

It's not obviously wrong.

So I think that hypothesis is out there as a possibility.

People have tried to make animations like this in some way, but one way to think about it, you know, I think there's a huge danger in being too interested in yourself.

This comes across in my book, I think.

But it's very, very tempting to be interested in your own history and think it's important.

It's obviously not important compared to other people's history.

However, if you think about one person's history,

And you think about where their ancestors lived two generations, four generations, eight generations back in the past.

Those are your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents.

You may even know where they lived.

But then you can actually plot on a map a different number of generations back in the past where your ancestors lived.

And it's interesting to do within your family because, you know, maybe you're from, you know, I'm from my ancestors going back a few generations or in Europe somewhere, different parts of Europe, for example.

So people do this.

And when you get a test back from one of these personal ancestry testing companies like 23andMe, they'll say, oh, you are, you know,