[elli1]

Does anyone know what the distribution of the 20% gene is?

The last paragraph in the article attributes the 20% to a secondary migration from the Middle East.

I'm curious to learn if this type of DNA testing has been applied to testing the ''out of Africa'' theory.

[maro]

What I mean is, is there a north/south bias in the 20% gene, or an east/west bias, or some other distributional pattern that could be connected to a historical hypothesis? My own guess is that the 20% gene is spread very evenly, because the Middle Easterners became Indo-Europeans in the Ukraine staging area, and were already a hybrid group when they started conquering Europe. But I welcome anyone with facts.

[blam]

"I'm curious to learn if this type of DNA testing has been applied to testing the ''out of Africa'' theory."

Gene Study Identifies Five Human Populations

[expatpat]

The answer is "Yes". A study of the Y chromosome 'markers' (mutations) showed that most of the world's humans descended from a tribe of bushmen who still live in Africa (the ones who communicate by clicking). The current trabal members have faces quite different from Negroes, looking more like Central Asians and Amerinds.

[AZLiberty]

The book The Seven Daughters of Eve reports on a similar analysis using mitochondrial DNA, which are passed only from female to female. The authors use the data to claim that all women in Europe were descended from seven unique female individuals, the "seven daughters of eve". I recommend the first half of the book highly for its scientific content. The second half is a speculative attempt to recreate the daily lives of the seven women.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Yes. It's the y-chromosome (for men, the mitochrondrial DNA for women) that strongly support the out-of-Africa hypothesis.

The main evidence is that the people worldwide are more closely related to each other and to modern Africans than would be the case if separate developments occured more than about 50,000 years ago. (Still, one then only pushes the out-of-Africa back a few hundred centuries.)