LECTURE: Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

Professor Oppenheimer qualified in medicine from Oxford University in 1971 and embarked on a career in tropical paediatrics. He has spent the last twenty years working and travelling in the Far East and Pacific region and has become a world-recognised expert in the synthesis of DNA studies with archaeological and other evidence to track ancient migrations All non-Africans descend from a group of humans that left Africa 85,000 years ago across the mouth of the Red Sea to South Asia. They then moved on to Australia arriving 20,000 years later, and much later into Europe and the Americas.

This is the startling conclusion of Professor Stephen Oppenheimer’s scientific detective story Out of Eden: the peopling of the world, which contradicts the accepted wisdom about our origins.

Through a synthesis of genetics, archaeology and climatology an extraordinarily clear view of human origins has been revealed, overturning the commonly held view that modern humans left Africa from the north and the south in several waves to populate Europe and Asia.

The key to this new and detailed story of our migration is a particular DNA molecule — mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). mtDNA passes from mother to child, each generation, unchanged, therefore every person alive on the Earth today has inherited this small collection of genes from one single great-great-great-grandmother, nearly 200,000 years ago. There are occasional mutations in the mtDNA molecule; these can be traced back in time, ultimately enabling the tracing of migrations of people. This trail of maternal inheritance is backed up by the Y-chromosomes passed only down the male line.

In this lecture, Professor Oppenheimer will detail the archaeological, climatological and genetic evidence at every stage of our fascinating journey out of Africa 85,000 years ago to paint a detailed picture of the origins of all peoples populating the earth today. Along the journey we’ll gain many fascinating insights into our origins and culture.