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Geneticist Lluis Quintana-Murci looks back at the origins of human beings and their evolution over time. He notably evokes the importance of interbreeding in human evolution.
Lluis Quintana-Murci is a geneticist, a professor at the Collège de France and he directs the human evolutionary genetics unit at the Institut Pasteur. In his book “The people of humans”, published by Odile Jacob, he explains in particular where we come from. “If we use genomic techniques, we see that all the inhabitants of the planet have a common and recent ancestor in Africa, from 200,000 or 300,000 years ago maximum. This is the first migration out of Africa that gave rise to all of us non-Africans. It begins 60,000 years ago and it starts in East Africa, follows a coastal route and then splits into two: one to Europe and the ‘other to Asia’, he explains.
In his book, Lluis Quintana-Murci writes that interbreeding is an accelerator of human evolution. “When a population migrates and encounters a new environment, whether it is a different climate, different nutritional resources or above all different pathogens at the base of infectious diseases, there are two options. Either we wait for a mutation, a change in the DNA that will arrive and will allow this population to resist better, such as the cold for example, or better cope with a new viral disease.The other option is to mix on a population that there is on the spot This population is already adapted, it is a much simpler solution, much faster”, he analyzes.