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Dr. Spencer Wells, Director of the Genographic Project and Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic, has charted the DNA shared by more than six billion people. His research shows that some 80,000 to 50,000 years ago, Africa saved Homo sapiens from extinction. Every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. At the time of the last ice age, our species was still limited to Africa. While Homo sapiens can be traced in the fossil record to 200,000 years ago, it is difficult to find any record of our species between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago. Genetic data suggest that the population dwindled to as few as 2,000 individuals concentrated in the area of Africa marked on the maps below. Since that time, six and a half billion descendants of those original 2000 survivors spread across the continents. You can trace your haplogroup to find out the migratory route your ancestors traveled. “The greatest history book ever written,” Wells says, “is the one hidden in our DNA.” The Genographic project, and others involving geneology, make Black Like You all that more important—a wry and engaging read, not only for all Americans, but for everyone curious about his or her unique place in a somewhat radical reassessment of the origins and idiosyncrasies of race and cultural evolution. Ironically, Black Like You offers a missing link in the spellbinding chronicle of human history. “As John Strausbaugh has written here, himself invoking Albert Murray: ‘The so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.’ ”
—from the afterword by Darius James
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