The Great Human Journey

Wallace and Darwin, the Museum Mice from the Halls of the American Museum of Natural History, are off on another adventure! It's amazing what you can find in a museum and how far you can travel in a small time machine made from a yoghurt cup! Have you ever wondered where we humans all came from and how there came to be so many of us? The answers, as our two mice will show you, lie everywhere including in our own DNA. So there is the Big Picture of The Great Human Journey from the middle of Africa to Australia, America and Asia and then there's the Tiny (really tiny) Picture too of molecules and cells that we can trace inside ourselves and our Genome like long strings of letters that tell us where we came from and who our ancestors were, and where they were when and how they got there! In their 22 Million Day Journey our intrepid mice, Wallace and Darwin, trace the biggest genealogy of all and find that all humans are 85% African and only 15% from the rest of the world! That is if you start counting our Genes - all 25,000 of them give or take an overlap! We took all this with us on our long walks from East Africa to Australia and from Australia to Asia and Europe between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago. 35,000 years later it only took us a few thousand years more to get from Alaska to Chile! We took our sweet time creating cultures and civilizations as we went. And we did it without GPS! And we even know we wore clothes 170,000 years ago. How? Because Lice too have DNA. It is amazing what our genes can tell us and what the genes of other species tell us too! Mitochondrial DNA we inherit from our mothers tells us where they have been. And from the tiny threads of our Y chromosomes we inherit from our fathers we can tell where they have been too. And then there's the Rats! They followed us in our canoes and boats and stayed on islands with us where we can trace their journeys too. Wallace and Darwin have appeared in two previous adventures: Bones Brains and DNA: The Human Genome and Human Evolution and Brain: A 21st century Look at a 400-Million-year-Old Organ. Their creators Tattersall, DeSalle and Wynne have plans to send them on further excursions in The Tree of Life and The Anatomy of Evolution. Stay tuned! Ian Tattersall is currently Curator in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Robert DeSalle is a Curator in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History. He lives in New York in Alphabet City. Patricia J Wynne is an award winning artist who lives with her husband, the artist, Donald Silver in New York City. She works at the American Museum of Natural History and teaches numerous courses when she is not illustrating books. Her books are frequently on Book of the Year Lists in Newsweek, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Parade, New York Times Book Review, and others.