David Reich

Since that time, Europeans are the result of mixture of Yamnaya and farmers and hunter-gatherers.

People in different Near Eastern groups are the mixture of kind of early Iranians and early Levantine people and Anatolians who are super different from each other.

There's huge differences amongst East Asians, huge differences amongst Papuans and East Asians, profound differences amongst different Native American groups that come together to form groups that we have data from later in example after example we look for.

So if you think about any one lineage today, any one group of people, and you want to trace people's ancestors back in time and think, where do our ancestors scatter in geography at different time points?

Almost everybody's ancestors are scattered into...

different geographic distributions that are not all in the same place.

So the evidence that our lineage was mostly in Africa is based on an idea, I think, an assumption, a kind of inertial idea that our lineage must have always been in Africa because Africa is the center of human history.

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,