"So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it - the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology."

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Source: Finding the roots of modern humans by Marsha Walton, www.cnn.com. April 14, 2005.

About the author

Spencer Wells

Geneticist

Spencer Wells is a geneticist and anthropologist known for his research on human migration and genetic diversity, particularly through his work 'The Journey of Man'.

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"Imagine you're copying a very long document, and occasionally you'll put an A where there should be a C. And that mistake has been translated down through the generations, and more mistakes have accumulated. So the longer the lineage has been in existence, the more mistakes the sequence is going to have."

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