Sudan is the Origin of Humanity, Says Oxford Study

ACCORDING to the two articles copied here below, everybody alive today came from one African country, Sudan. Note that an excerpt from World History says: "Kush was a kingdom in northern Africa in the region corresponding to modern-day Sudan. The larger region around Kush (later referred to as Nubia) was inhabited c. 8,000 BCE but The Kingdom of Kush rose much later."

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Article from Sudanow Magazine

Dated 02 January 2023 - full copy:

Sudan is the Origin of Humanity, Says Oxford Study

Everybody alive today came from one African country

Everybody alive today came from one African country 

(The Independent) Ariana Baio

Khartoum, Jan 1, 2023 (Sudanow) - It is well known that all humans alive today can be traced back to a common ancestor but a study may have found where that ancestor originates.

Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute mapped the entirety of genetic relationships among humans to create the largest human family tree ever.

By combining modern and ancient human genomes data from eight different databases, the researchers were able to create a massive family tree.

This allowed them to see how a person’s genetic sequence relates to another using the points of the genome.

Everybody alive today came from one African country

Everybody alive today came from Sudan, according to study

“Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships,” Lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns said.

 

“We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived.”

Where they lived? Sudan, Africa.

All humans may have originated in modern-day Sudan, according to a study. Google Maps

Dr Wohns told Reuters, "The very earliest ancestors we identify trace back in time to a geographic location that is in modern Sudan.

“These ancestors lived up to and over 1 million years ago—which is much older than current estimates for the age of Homo sapiens—250,000 to 300,000 years ago. So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans," Dr Wohns said.

Researchers used 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations and samples that ranged from 1,000s to over 100,000 years.

By using a new method to compile the data, algorithms were able to predict where common ancestors were in evolutionary trees to explain some patterns of genetic variation.

The results were a network of almost 27 million ancestors.

“The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples,” Dr Wohns says.

View source: https://www.sudanow-magazine.net/page.php

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Related

Article from UNILAD

By Callum Jones

UNILAD Journalist at LADbible Group 

Dated 17:37 28 Dec 2022 GMT- full copy:

Everybody alive today came from one African country, study says

A study from earlier this year has revealed the one African country where everybody alive today originated from

Tracing humans back to a common ancestor is nothing new and is something that has been done for many years.

But a study from February 2022 may have made a major breakthrough by finding out where that ancestor originates from.

Researchers from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute ended up mapping out the largest ever human family tree ever by using the genetic relationships among humans.

They did this by combining modern and genomes data from eight different databases.

In a press release, Dr Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute, and one of the co-authors of the study, said: "We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated all the genetic variation we find in humans today.

Firoze Edassery / Alamy Stock Photo

"This genealogy allows us to see how every person’s genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome."

The study says that the individual genomic regions are only inherited from one parent, either the mother or the father.

They described each point on the genome as a tree, with a set of trees known as a 'tree sequence'.

This links genetic regions back through to time to ancestors, which is where the genetic variation first popped up.

Other lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns said: "Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships.

"We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived.

"The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples."

So from estimates that the researchers came up with, the ancestors apparently lived in Sudan, Africa.

Alan Collins / Alamy Stock Photo

Dr Wohns told Reuters: "The very earliest ancestors we identify trace back in time to a geographic location that is in modern Sudan.

"These ancestors lived up to and over 1 million years ago—which is much older than current estimates for the age of Homo sapiens—250,000 to 300,000 years ago.

"So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans."

Researchers got the data from 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations.

These samples ranged from 1,000s of years ago to over 100,000 years in the midst of time.

Featured Image Credit: MJ Photography / Alamy Stock Photo/Timothy Hodgkinson / Alamy Stock Photo

View original: https://www.unilad.com/news/everybody-alive-today-african-608374-20221228

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UPDATE by Sudan Watch Editor 08 Jan 2025 16:07 GMT: 

Added UNILAD article to above post dated 08 Jan 2025.
- - -

Here is a link to evolutionary geneticist Dr Yan Wong 

cited in the UNILAD article:
https://www.bdi.ox.ac.uk/Team/yan-wong
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Plus Dr Wong's paper cited in the UNILAD article:

A unified genealogy of modern and ancient genomes
WONG HY., KELLEHER J., McVean G.
TYPE
Journal article
JOURNAL
Science
PUBLICATION DATE
27/01/2022
https://www.bdi.ox.ac.uk/publications/1234422
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And X/Twitter account and website of Big Data Institute Oxford:

The Big Data Institute | University of Oxford |
Tweets about health, our research and impact.
Oxford, England
https://www.bdi.ox.ac.uk
Big Data Institute
@bdi_oxford
- - -

End

Sudan is African. We Are All Africans. Researchers sequence genomes from more isolated populations

THIS post is here for future reference so when there is news questioning Sudan's identity as to whether it is an African or Arab country, one can point out this map and article and say "Sudan is in Africa: We Are All Africans".

From Discover Magazine
By Bridget Alex
Dated 22 December 2016 12:00 AM; 

Updated May 17, 2019 11:17 PM - here is a full copy:

We Are All Africans

Researchers sequence the genomes from more isolated populations

A 3,000-year-old pictograph from southern Africa depicts humans on the move. Peter Chadwick/Science Source

Every person’s DNA contains part of the human story: how our ancestors — lanky, tool-using apes — spread across the planet, colonizing environments as varied as the Himalayas, Arctic and Amazon Basin.

Millions of people have had at least part of their DNA studied, but because they’re mostly urban Westerners and East Asians, the samples repeat the same details of that story. From this data, we’ve known for three decades that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa some 200,000 years ago. To answer when and how humans migrated out of Africa, researchers needed DNA from a wider pool of people.

Three research groups sequenced high-quality genomes of 787 people from over 270 populations. Their findings were published concurrently in Nature in September. Two of the studies drew samples from isolated groups across the globe to maximize linguistic and cultural diversity. The third focused on indigenous people of Australia and Papua New Guinea.

“Genomes from these more remote populations really can tell us a huge amount about human evolutionary history,” says Evelyn Jagoda, a Harvard University evolutionary genetics Ph.D. student and co-author of one of the studies.

Although each team collected and analyzed genomes independently, they came to the same general conclusion: Genetic similarities between peoples of Eurasia, Oceania and the Americas indicate that all non-Africans descend from a small population that left Africa roughly 60,000 years ago.

Older Homo sapiens made it out of Africa, but these populations must have mostly died out. Only one of the three studies detected a trace of their existence: About 2 percent of the genomes of Papuans are probably from these earlier migrants.

Researchers hope to use the new data to find population-specific diseases and adaptations. There are still many things to be learned, says Nick Patterson, a Broad Institute computational biologist and a study co-author. “This data is extremely rich.”

Source: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/we-are-all-africans

Map of Africa (Source: Britannica)

END

Sudan: the real magical kingdom - This is Sudan, land of the kingdom of Kush - The pyramids in Meroe

The pyramids in Meroe

GETTY

Article from The Sunday Times, UK

Written by Teresa Levonian Cole

Dated Sunday 23 February 2020, 12.01am

Sudan: the real magical kingdom

You’ll be enchanted by historic sights, dazzling desert and warm‑hearted locals

From the 16th floor of the Corinthia Hotel in Khartoum, I looked out over three ribbons of silvery water glittering in the sun. Two of them, on my right, belonged to the Blue Nile, which hugged the landmass of Tuti Island. On my left, like a muscular biceps, the bulge of the White Nile gradually tapered to where the two rivers met. In Egypt, such a significant union might be marked by fanfare or, at the very least, a tourist kiosk. But here, as I discovered when I took a boat ride downstream to the confluence, there is nothing. No guests, no celebrations: the marriage of the Blue and the White Nile is an intimate affair.

This is Sudan, land of the kingdom of Kush

Continue reading https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sudan-the-real-magical-kingdom-7qrzrktlg

Wyclef Jean writes and sings a great song for Sudan

Wyclef Jean is a Haitian rapper, musician and actor. At the age of nine, Jean emigrated to the USA with his family. He first achieved fame as a member of the New Jersey hip hop group the Fugees. Jean has won three Grammy Awards for his musical work. 

Here is Wyclef's tweet with a clip of him singing a great new song he wrote for Sudan.

Music will always be the best way I know to express myself So I wrote this song for Sudan pic.twitter.com/DhHGMWLYwu

— Wyclef Jean (@wyclef) 30 June 2019

Here is a direct link to the above tweet: https://twitter.com/wyclef/status/1145327756504391681