DID HUMANITY BEGIN IN SUDAN?

       Most scientists are of the opinion that humanity began in Eastern Africa, a study carried out by Oxford has narrowed the geographic origin of humanity's genetic diversity to Sudan. The research about the origin of humanity is inconclusive, as they hold that there is still data to be collected to reach a conclusive narrative. However, some geneticists argue against the notion that humanity started in one African location. 

       According to the University of Oxford website, the past twenty years have witnessed substantial progress in human genetic research, a new method of merging genome sequences was developed by the Big Data Institute which led to the uncovering. Dr Yan Wong explicates, "We have built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all humanity that models as exactly as we can, the history that generated all the genetic variations we find in humans today. This genealogy allows us to see how every person's genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome". With the inclusion of modern and ancient genomes combined with their method. The researchers were able to predict where our common ancestors lived, the inferred geographic region from their oldest samples suggested that they originated in Sudan. Anthony Wilder writes that "these findings reflect the depths of African lineages in the inferred tree sequence and are compatible with well-dated early modern human fossils from eastern and northern Africa."

       Despite their confidence, the researchers held that their research had few resources to thoroughly explain the study. Hence, Anthony Wilder also writes, "We caution that if we analyzed data from a grid sampling of populations in Africa, the geographic centres of gravity of independent lineages at different times depths would shift. Additionally, migrations occurring within the past few thousand years mean that present-day distributions of groups in Africa and elsewhere may not represent those of their ancestors and thus we may have a distorted picture of ancient geographic distributions." This narrative was similar to an ancient Greek tale which claimed that the term, "Ethiopian"  was frequently in use in reference to African people, especially the people of Nubia or Sudan. A historian writes that, "the distinctive features of the cultural developments in the kingdom of Kush, also frequently termed Nubia in scholarly as well as in general literature and identical to the Aithiopia (Ethiopia) of classical authors."

        Greek Scholars often spoke about the Ethiopians, in Diodorus' work called "General History" Diodorus proclaims the antiquity of the Ethiopian people as expressed by other historians of the same period, he writes, "Now the Ethiopians, as the historians relate were the first of all men and the proofs of this statement, they say are manifest. For that, they did not come into their land as immigrants from abroad but they were natives of it and so justly bearing the name of "autochthones" (sprung from the soil itself) is, they maintain, conceded by practically all men". It is quite intriguing that the Oxford study and the ancient Greek narrative both claim that the first humans were located in Sudan.