Our root were n’t blessed with smartphones , WiFi and Amazon Prime , but for what it ’s deserving they did have a little extra deoxyribonucleic acid . According to astudypublished today in Science , Homo sapiens have shed about 40.7 million stem duo of deoxyribonucleic acid since transmigrate out of Africa nearly two million years ago .
The human genome ’s 3 billion base pairs — chemicals represented by the letter A , T , G , and C — are often liken to a set of blueprints , or an instruction book . But this analogy does n’t quite do justice to the fact that organic evolution has made a crazy mess of our autobiography . Pieces of the human genome are constantly being rewrite , duplicated , and crossed out for no good reason . You ’d be secure off imagining a book of account that a four - class - old with scissors and a copy machine take his hand on .
Nevertheless , brave scientist are render to make sensory faculty of the human genome to remodel our evolutionary history . By liken copies of the genome between populations , we can start to put together together how human populations have evolved and diverge over time .
deoxyribonucleic acid deletions were used to retrace common human relationship among group of humans . Longer line show groups with more deletions . mental image credit : P. Sudmandt et al 2015 , via Science News
That ’s exactly what the authors of the raw study did , by sequencing the genomes of 236 individual from 125 distinct population . Their results showed that our root shed about 15.8 million bag pairs of DNA before leave Africa . As population spread across Earth ’s Continent , they jettisoned additional chunks of DNA here and there . But sure populations have also been win DNA , mostly through duplication events where serving of the genetic codification were accidentally copied and pass on .
Does the net loss of deoxyribonucleic acid over clock time really matter ? After all , despite what you may have learned on Star Trek , we ’re not about to de - evolve into a tribe of eyeless fish . perchance organic evolution is just trimming the fat ? Could be ! This is the first sentence scientists have comprehensively documented the red ( and gain ) of great chunks of DNA , and we ’ve got a long way to go before we can say what it all intend .
But scientist distrust that desoxyribonucleic acid loss and duplication events could be significant evolutionary driving military force . For example , some groups of people have up to six copy of CLPS genes , which encode pancreatic enzymes that may dilute roue sugar level . And certain populations in Africa carry cistron duplicate that may protect against sleeping sickness due to trypanosome parasites . Scientists are now flagging these interesting duplications for further field .
If there ’s one takeout food , it ’s that despite all the information at our fingertips , the very foundations of our biological science are still a perfect mystery .
[ read the full scientific paperhereH / TScience News ]
meet the writer at[email protected]or follow heron Twitter .
Top figure : Geographic location of populations sampled in the discipline , via Peter H. Sudmant
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