South Africa: Ancient DNA Unearths Fascinating Secrets. But What About the Ethics?

analysis

Ancient DNA is starting to reveal the secrets of how people emerged from, moved into or moved around Africa. Human skeletons from Saldanha Bay in South Africa's Western Cape province, Ballito Bay in its KwaZulu-Natal province and Mota Cave in Ethiopia; Tanzania and now Malawi have been analysed and the results recently published.

I am part of a team working on a whole series of skeletons from the Later Stone site of Faraoskop in the Western Cape. We are trying to find both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA samples to work out relationships between individuals in what may have been a case of mass killing some 2000 years ago.

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