Naturally, Africa should be one of the most-studied continents in regards to tracing our genetic history, but no one has been able to reconstruct ancient African DNA-until now, as researchers across the United Kingdom and Ireland have managed to do just that. The main problem has been the climate: Scientists were able to compile DNA fragments from European Neanderthals, prehistoric Asian herders, and Paleoindians from the Americas, but the heat and humidity of Africa degraded DNA to the point where too little was left to compose a genome.
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