Cover image

Cover Africa as the cradle of humankind. Every living human descends from a small group in sub-Saharan Africa, which dispersed into the wider world approximately 60,000 years ago, displacing earlier forms. Since the initial Out of Africa dispersal, the most recent contacts between Africans and Europeans are supposed to have occurred during Romanization, the Arab expansion into Iberia and the Mediterranean basin, and, most recently, during the period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Analysis of entire mitochondrial DNA genomes demonstrates, for the first time, that admixture between both groups occurred as early as 11,000 years ago. The signatures of these ancestral episodes are represented by way of a figurative DNA double helix and a depiction of humans traveling from Africa to Europe. (Cover illustration by Fernando Barreira, bPORb. Creative Project. [For details, see Cerezo et al., pp. 821–826.])