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Wandering Aboriginals
Species: Aboriginal Australian, Homo sapiens
Genome size: 3 billion base pairs
Interesting fact: The first sequence of the Australian Aboriginal genome was obtained from an 80-year-old lock of hair, which had been a gift from a young Aboriginal man to a British ethnologist traveling in Australia in the 1920s. The sequence revealed that the ancestors of modern-day Aboriginals, along with the ancestors of New Guineans and other Oceanians, migrated out of Africa around 60,000 years ago—preceding the ancestors of Europeans and mainland Asians by about 20,000 years.
M. Rasmussen et al., “An Aboriginal Australian genome reveals separate human dispersals into Asia,” Science, doi: 10.1126/science.1211177, 2011.
Immune-regulating bacteria
Species: Segmented filamentous bacteria (SFB)
Genome size: 1.57 million base pairs
Interesting fact: In 2009, researchers ...
