This woman is the mother of mankind,
the genetic Eve from whom we all descend.
She lived 150,000 years ago in East Africa,
and every one on earth is related to her.
Her daughters and granddaughters would take modern humans out of Africa
to populate the rest of the world,
the most incredible and important journey that mankind would ever make.
Genetic tracking, for the first time gives us a route map of our journey.
With it we can follow our families of Eve
as they travel through an empty world, overcome hardships,
separate and go their different ways to discover new lands.
It tells, for the first time, who we are and where we come from.
The most profound questions that have troubled mankind
since we first raised our heads and looked at the stars.
This new science is a breakthrough.
Every one of us can now trace our part of this incredible story.
We took samples from these people in Chicago.
Our genetic testing will show them how their ancestors traveled the world
to reach this destination.
150,000 years ago, the world was in the grip of an ice age.
The ice caps have advanced.
Sea levels drop 400 feet.
North Africa is a vast desert with small islands of green.
On these islands are tiny groups of people
These are the first modern humans,
recognizably like us today in physique, intellect and abilities.
We are the same people they were.
The brain that first started chipping stone tools also took us into space.
They are hunter-gatherers,
living in widely scattered groups.
Roaming each year over great distances sheltering where they can,
gathering seeds and fruit.
150,000 years ago, hunting was the key to survival.
It explains much about the way the human race developed.
Hunting needs careful thought and planning.
It needed cooperation that demanded enhanced intelligence
and communication skills.
Genetic tracking's beginning to unlock more secrets
than we ever believed possible.
In just 7,000 generations,
modern humans have left Africa and penetrated every corner of the globe
and through the unbroken genetic thread binding us to our past
we can begin to understand why it happened.
Archaeologists can tell us in astonishing detail
how modern humans lived.
But, to understand who we are and where we come from
we must look at our genetic heritage.
Genetic Eve,
the woman from whom we all descend was not the only woman living
at the time or even the most fertile.
But her mitochondrial genes were the most successful,
and the only ones to survive.
Everyone alive today
can trace a common ancestral line back to this one woman
through a unique part of our DNA, mitochondrial DNA.
DNA, the blueprint of life,
is our own molecular pin code, and uniquely identifies each of us.
Mitochondria are tiny structures found inside nearly all human cells.
It is separate from the normal chromosomal DNA
that dictates our height or the color of our eyes.
Men inherit it from their mother,
but they can't pass it on.
In women, it carries on from mother to daughter,
down the endless generation, almost unchanged.
And this is how we can trace our way back to our genetic Eve
and her daughters.
So, written within it, is the history of the world's women
and therefore, the human race.
Professor Rebecca Cann was the pioneering scientist
who uncovered the first all-important clue.
I started working on human mitochondrial DNA
so that I would have some kind of view that was objective,
that would help me understand and help other people
understand how humans around the world are related.
With this new science, she could.
Harmless mutation happens all the time in some part of the mitochondrial DNA
leaving minute markers at every change
These markers are like bar codes and can be read in the same way.
Cann and her team discovered the changes happen
at a fairly constant rate.
They found the groups with the earliest markers were
the Africans living inside Africa,
and wondered if they might be the oldest people in the world.
I was very excited when I first started to get evidence,
and it was so counter-intuitive.
I put 20 Europeans and 20 African-Americans
on a sheet of X-ray film
and every African-American showed differences
and all the Europeans were the same.
And I thought I'd mislabeled something and I thought I made
some drastic mistake.
And we kept repeating and repeating things as we got more samples
from different areas
I realized that it was a difference in the pattern.
And that this whole new type of evidence, based on mitochondria,
was going to change the way we thought about modern humans.
In 1987, Cann and her colleagues published a paper,
showing for the first time, that the markers stretched
back to Africa.
Showing quite clearly that this was the birthplace of the human race.
New Guinean tribesman, Parisian bartender,
American teacher, Polynesian farmer,
all were improbable relatives, linked through one black woman
150,000 years ago.
Their findings caused a sensation.
The responses of people were sort of amazing.
The public was genuinely interested in certain aspects of it.
There was a tendency to misinterpret the data because of the terminology
was to describe this woman African Eve
and people-and people of a single woman in the Judeo-Christian bible,
the wife of Adam.
I have to say even my own uncle
sent me a X'mas card the year that our study was published,
saying: How dare you, you know grandma wasn't black!
Her work is rewriting human history.
Through it, we now know the first mutations took place
in Africa, maybe 150,000 years ago
and belong to our genetic Eve.
Professor Christopher Stringer, Britain's leading paleoanthropologist,
was involved in the dating of the earliest modern human skulls.
This skull is as close as we can get to what the face of mitochondrial Eve
would have looked like. It's a very complete skull
found in sediments in a cave
dating for about 120,000 years ago.
What we can see here that it's a more human.
We've got a high-rounded vault to the skull,
a face that's tucked in under the cranial vault.
And this is what she looked like.
Using forensic reconstruction techniques,
muscle and flesh have been added to the skull
and provide us with the very first glimpse
of how our genetic mother might have looked 150,000 years ago.
This is the closest we can get.
Africa is the birthplace of all the various human species
that walk this planet.
This vast, isolated natural laboratory
molded humans over endless cycles of alternating desert and green.
And, it is the climate records that give us the next clue.
Modern humans made many attempts to make the long trek out of Africa,
settling in different parts of the old world,
but they did not survive.
Climatic records indicate
a brief but devastating global freeze up at the time
that turned the whole Middle East into extreme desert.
Trapped in the northern quarter about the Sahara, there was no return,
and few places to take refuge.
Neither they nor any of their line survived.
They would die in severe drought about 110,000 years ago.
Their bones were discovered in Qafzeh caves near Nazareth in Galilee in 1933.
Thirteen fragile skeletons;
one a woman,
a tiny baby at her feet.
When these bones were first uncovered
they were the oldest complete modern human skeletons ever found.
The numerous skeletons that have been found in caves
in Israel at the sites of Qafzeh and Skhul
shows that there were modern humans outside of Africa
over 100,000 years ago.
Those modern humans may well have gone out to the Nile corridor,
through Sinai and into the Middle East
But, it doesn't look like that they went any further.
In a sense, that they were a dead end.
It would be 40,000 years before they would try again.
80,000 years ago the world was cooling down again.
Once again, the ice caps were advancing; drying out the lands.
Life became much harder.
As Africa dried so did the drinking water.
Ocean records show sea levels dropping dramatically
as the world's water became locked in ice.
As the game spread north,
our hunter-gatherers were forced to become fishermen and beachcombers.
This is our new Eve, our new family,
direct descendants of the daughters of the original genetic Eve
Now living on the coast, surviving on the harvest of the sea.
Our entire survival has always been at the mercy of the climate.
When times were good we could spread out.
A bigger range meant more food.
But the ice age froze the world and the deserts closed in,
forcing our groups into smaller territories, huddled against the coast.
Their beachcomber diet consisted of fish, scallops, oysters and clams.
But the Red Sea became much saltier, making fishing and beachcombing
more difficult.
Until recently, there was little evidence our ancestors actually
occupied the coastal areas of east Africa
or exploited near shore marine resources.
This is Sifi Bearhay, a geologist.
In 1999, he was part of an international expedition
looking for evidence of modern human occupation in Eritrea.
In the Gulf of Suez in the Red Sea they stumbled on
a remarkable discovery
of stone tools imbedded in an ancient fossilized coral reef.
The reef was dated 125,000 years old.
This is the world's first recorded oyster bar.
Six and a half kilometers long and 15 meters above the current sea levels.
It's the oldest evidence of beachcombing anywhere in the world.
Buried in it are human tools, along with fossilized oyster,
clam and scallop shells.
It provides absolutely clear evidence that our ancestors
were exploiting the sea.
This is the unit
where we have an inter-stratified layer of big oyster and
mollusk shells at the base,
and they're pretty quite horizontal
and this was a platform where modern man used to be walking
and dumping their stone tools and some of the shells they were eating.
This is a hand ax, with a sharp end,
and some of the shells that have been shed from this inter-stratified layer,
and they've been using this for breaking the shells and eating them.
And then, when they were finished with it, they would sort of dump
the hand ax and also the shells
and walk to the next site.
But the most important thing is not this
because you cannot date it.
It's what you find insi tu which makes it very, very important.
If you see this one is an obsidian tool.
There have been used to smash some of these oyster bedded that you see there.
You don't see both completely enclosed that have been smashed and the goodies
have been eaten.
And these are some of those very important stone tools
that have been discovered.
This is the place, the first place where beachcombing for marine resources
have been documented worldwide.
And very well.
These shell remains are also a vital clue to the reasons
why our ancestors made the long walk out of Africa.
On a constant diet of seafood, maybe more children
would have survived.
But the increasing numbers would make the demand for food even more desperate.
Cases like this one would have numbered just a few hundred.
At one time, there were only about 10,000 modern humans alive
in the whole world.
We were as endangered a species as the great apes are today.
When the beachcombing and spearfishing failed to support them
they no longer had a choice.
If they would survive, they had to move across the Red Sea
freak monsoon conditions were watering the green inviting hills of the Yemen
Scientists always thought our ancestors migrated from Africa
many times, group after group. And it is believed they always
went north via Egypt and modern Israel
But the DNA trail tells a different story.
Professor Steven Oppenheimer is one of the world's foremost authorities
on current genetic research into DNA tracking.
By putting together the genetic tree with prehistoric weather patterns
he's the first to come up with the extraordinary idea that our ancestors
came out of Africa by a single southern route.
This beach is on the west coast of the Red Sea, the African side.
Over on the other side we can see the mountains of the Yemen
I believe this is where our ancestors crossed
on the first stage of their journey to the rest of the world.
These traits are known locally to fishermen as the Gates of Grieth
because of the terrible fierce currents crossing.
But 80,000 years ago the sea level was 150 foot further down.
As a result a number of islands and reefs appeared
which allowed our ancestors to cross as if it were on stepping-stones
over to the Yemen.
Man had to come out of Africa in the end
or his primate relatives had
but the timing and the route were determined by climate swings.
Driven by hunger, sweeping habitat,
and maybe the first stirrings of the restless human curiosity
about the land ahead,
our precious group of modern humans prepared to move.
There are two routes out of Africa
the north of the Red Sea, across the Suez, and into the Middle East.
And here in the south, across the Gates of Grieth, into Yemen,
and on through the south Arabian coast to India.
Both routes are possible.
Perhaps, to get through to the north
our ancestors would have to cross the Sahara desert.
And at the time, it was even drier than it is today.
Here in the south, all they had to do was to cross this short stretch of water,
only 10 miles across to the Yemen.
So, this was a region they could go to with confidence.
I think this beach is very important in human history
because I think this is the place that our ancestors crossed
from Africa to the Yemen
on the first step of their journey to the rest of the world.
And this is the only place that they had a successful exit from Africa.
I believe the most important journey the human race ever took
started here on this beach 80,000 years ago.
One small group of people, one exodus.
The single most important event in the population of the world.
This is no single trudge across the sandbanks.
This was an epic struggle to stay alive,
not just for themselves, but the rest of mankind.
Those who survived the crossing, who didn't succumb to the dangers
of the Gates of Grieth, came to a virgin land.
This is the new frontier in the beginning of the rest of the world.
Yemen beaches were on the edge of world.
An old group were the first modern humans,
the first of their kind outside Africa
surviving in this place.
This group was on their own at the edge of the new world.
Would have been better for our migrants across into the Yemen.
For start, the beach combing in the Gulf of Aden would have been
a lot better than on the Red Sea
Unlike the parched, salty beaches they had left,
the Yemen was green and fertile, full of fresh water, game and
shady oasis, safe haven for a family to settle.
They were probably a small group.
Maybe, maximum about 250 persons.
They would have been scattered around in family units of five to 20,
but networking with the other groups in the population.
Anything less than about 200 would not have been viable.
They would not have been able to cope with epidemics of
disease or famine.
We know though Eve and her daughters were among the survivors,
because from them are descended everyone in the world outside Africa.
The new science of tracking is a breakthrough.
Using the single unbroken mitochondrial genetic line
scientists constructed a vast family tree pinpointing the markers,
fixing them by time and place,
it shows that once outside of Africa, our ancestors split up.
Some going north and west,
some going east and south.
Once they had left Africa and the Yemen,
they went their separate ways, never to meet again.
When our ancestors first arrived here
they would have a selection of African lines.
A group of 250 people
at least five or six of different lines.
Over a thousand years if this population stayed isolated
that those lines would have reduced and reduced.
The total number of the population would have stayed the same.
It's rather like a Welsh village, hill village, or, or a village in Italy
where after a number of generations everybody gets to have the same surname
This process of reduction of lines is called drift
and it happens in all small, isolated communities.
The smaller and isolated a group is,
the faster the mitochondrial DNA line comes down to one.
Not to one person, or even to one group,
but one mitochondrial DNA line.
Some women have no daughters.
Some daughters don't survive.
So, in the end only one line is left.
Totally isolated, they could breed only amongst themselves.
The genetic map shows it would take about a thousand years
for the mitochondrial line to be reduced to one.
One genetic minute shared by all non-African people
everywhere throughout history.
It's a single line that convinces Steven Oppenheimer
he is right about our African ancestry
The implications of the single exodus from Africa are enormous.
For start, there's a simple observation
that Australians, New Guineans, Southeast Asians,
Chinese, Native Americans, Europeans and Indians
all come from the same small group.
That means that this small group in the last 80,000 years
has diversified enormously into complete physically different
populations in different parts of the world
that have adapted physically and culturally to the new environments
they've found and explored.
Through the Gulf of Aden out of Africa
families waiting until the climate change allowed them to move.
Their descendents would be the people of the Middle East,
spreading north into Europe 40,000 years later
and founding the vibrant, cosmopolitan cities we know today.
Others would continue past the gulf, moving east, beachcombing their way
along the coast to the Indian Ocean,
looking for warm and gentle places to stop.
Within 6,000 years of reaching the Yemen beaches,
our ancestors would eat their way to Malaysia.
6,000 miles from Africa,
our family are deep in the tropical rain forests of Southeast Asia.
These are the descendants of Eve,
hunting in the jungles of Malaysia roaming in small bands,
staying in one place long enough to beat the harness the wildlife
and then moving on.
Their bodies are beginning to adapt to the rainforest conditions.
Away from the harsh African sun their skins become lighter,
their stature reduced by lack of meat.
Gathers in the jungle today
they live on fish, rats, squirrels and lizards,
on canopy game, fruits and roots.
They disguise and camouflage themselves to conform to the foliage
and imitate animal calls to deceive their quarry.
Life in the forest is shared with venomous snakes,
cobras, pythons and predatory animals.
Between leaving Africa and arriving in Australia
there's no clear archeological evidence
of the presence of modern humans or their amazing migration.
No skulls, no skeletons or graves.
Sea levels were 160 feet lower so,
whatever our family left behind on their coastal journeys
have been reclaimed by the sea.
The genetic trail is all we have.
It's not until we reach Malaysia that new evidence begins to fill
in the gaps.
The great Toba eruption in Sumatra 74,000 years ago
was the single biggest explosion in the last two million years.
The plume was 25 miles high
and plunged much of the world into six dark years of volcanic winter.
Northern Malaysia, India and the Middle East
were covered in a deadly shroud of thick volcanic ash.
The great Toba explosion, most destructive in the last
two million years
provides positive clues about our family's journey.
These are the Semang people; shy hunter-
gatherers of the interior jungles in the lake peninsula.
Much darker than the other Malaysian peoples around them,
they are part of the Orang Asli group.
Stephen Oppenheimer thinks they could be the surviving remnant
of our out of Africa family
that came through here 74,000 years ago.
If our ancestors had passed this way on their route from Africa
to Australia and New Guinea,
it's likely they would have left a genetic trace.
And we know, from previous surveys,
that the Orang Asli as a group of tribes in the Malay peninsula
or Malaysia are among the oldest people in this region.
And the Semang are probably the oldest of all.
Stephen Oppenheimer has come to this remote Semang village
to collect swab samples of DNA.
These, he hopes, will confirm his idea
If my theory is correct,
that they left Africa 80,000 years ago
they would have had to have traveled 6,000 miles to get here, in 6,000 years
In order to be here at the time of the Great Toba explosion.
That means about a mile a year
which is entirely feasible
for that sort of nomadic lifestyle of moving down the coast.
But to determine whether or not they belonged to
that first out of Africa group,
we need to look at their genetic lines and in particular the mitochondrial DNA
probably tell us
whether or not they come straight out of the two daughters of Eve
that's originated just outside Africa.
If they have their own unique lines
that suggests they've been isolated since that time 70 or 80,000 years ago
and that they have developed completely on their own.
If on the other hand, we might even find that their lines are ancestral
to people further down the line, like the Australians or the New Guineans.
Again, our genetic tracing will help us to see whether or not
that's the case.
The genetic survey may prove the Semang are an ancient race,
but it can't tell us exactly when they were here.
We have to look for other evidence to validate the theory.
These crude tools were found in a wooded valley
called Kota Tampan near Penang.
There are other sites nearby with the same sort of tools.
What makes these so particularly interesting is that
they are embedded in a fall of Toba ash
dated 74,000 years ago.
Professor Zorinana Najeek was looking for an ancient riveters
when she stumbled upon the Kota Tampan site.
Professor Najeek had actually found was a stone tool workshop,
which could be pinpointed to 74,000 years ago.
The ash covered the working floor.
That ash has been dated to 74,000 year ago.
This is a hammer stone that they used
and you can see that it's very comfortable to hold it in the hand.
And this is the edge that was used.
This is a chopper.
A type that is seen in a lot of Asia and Southeast Asia.
They, what they were after was the edge angle.
The edge angle had to be right and the edge had to be sharp.
This is used for heavy-duty work.
It's heavy, it's got a sharp edge, probably for felling trees.
Najee is convinced that they were left by modern man.
Kota Tampan also revealed man who had a complex mind.
His total technology revealed a rational, systematic
and organized mind;
the mind of homo sapiens.
These Kota Tampan tools, a crucial for the dating of
modern man's presence in Southeast Asia. They're