Definition
Human evolution (molecular clocks). The timescale of human evolution and migration can be estimated from genetic data that have been sampled from living, historical, and ancient humans. This can be done using statistical methods based on the molecular clock hypothesis.
Introduction
The timescale of human evolutionary origins and migration across the globe has been a long-standing focus of scientific research. Genetic studies of the human evolutionary timescale were first performed in the 1960s, with the divergence time between humans and chimpanzees being estimated using data from the albumin protein (Sarich and Wilson 1967). The complete sequence of the human mitochondrial genome, consisting of about 16.5 thousand nucleotides, was published in 1981 (Anderson et al. 1981). Two decades later, the International Human Genome Consortium (2001) released a complete draft sequence of the much larger nuclear genome, comprising 3.2 billion nucleotides. DNA sequences of mitochondrial...
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Ho, S.Y.W., Endicott, P. (2014). Molecular Clocks, Human Evolution. In: Rink, W., Thompson, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Scientific Dating Methods. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6326-5_79-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6326-5_79-1
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