Where do we humans come from?

All humans share a common origin somewhere in southeastern Africa where our species originated roughly 200,000 years ago. Starting from a common ancestor, which all primates share (including humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, etc.), our species began to differentiate itself and acquired anatomical and cognitive characteristics that distinguish them from the rest. This group is known as the modern human population. For thousands of years modern humans remained in Africa, but approximately 70,000 years ago a group left that continent in search of new lands and that is how the world began to populate. Anthropological evidence suggests that the departure from Africa occurred through the Middle East and that, following a coastal route, humans reached Southeast Asia and even Australia and Melanesia approximately 50-60 thousand years ago. Modern humans, leaving Africa, headed to Europe and Central and East Asia, where they encountered Neanderthals. By that time, the Neanderthals had already left Africa and inhabited part of Eurasia for the last 400,000 years. The last great migration occurred approximately 15-20,000 years ago when a group of humans crossed from Siberia through the Bering Strait to the American continent and populated the entire continent from North to South until reaching Patagonia.

What is genetic ancestry?
During this great migrations, many generations have passed and mutations have occurred in each one of them; this changes in our genetic material are transmitted to our children, who in turn transfer new mutations to their descendants and so on. It has been estimated that approximately 60 new mutations appear in each individual every new generation. This series of changes has made human populations different and is one of the main sources of the diversity that we observe nowadays. These genetic changes have been recorded in the DNA sequence of each individual and by comparing a large number of individuals we can identify the origin of each of those mutations. Mixing events can also be detected and the proportions in which the different ancestral population contributes to the genetic profile of any individual, can be succesfully calculated. This is what researchers call genetic ancestry!

Latin America is a region where a large amount of genetic admixture has occurred in the last 500 years, due to the interaction with populations from different continents that had been isolated for thousands of years in other regions of the world and therefore genetically differentiated. The greatest genetic contributions to the Latin American population come from native populations of America, which preserve a great ethno-linguistic and archaeological diversity.
However, there is also an important presence of ancestral components of very diverse origins given the intense migration that accompanied the colonization process in Mexico, the rest of Latin America and in even other regions of the world, which in turn have been connected much more easily in the “modern period” where intercontinental travel is more frequent, easier and cheaper.
This is how now genetic tools can help you discover your ancestral history and dig deep into your roots.