Tyrant Lord

North America, 67 million years ago

The sunrise’s golden glow drifted across the rolling sea of treetops. It descended through the canopy’s tangle of leaves, branches, and vines in scattered beams until it reached the forest understory. Within this maze of trees and tropical underbrush slept a giant.

A hide of black and dark green scales camouflaged his nine-ton bulk amidst the shadowed foliage until he cracked his flaming yellow eyes open. With the help of short yet brawny double-clawed arms, he propped himself off the forest floor onto even stronger hind legs, with his thick long tail hovering behind. He shook his head, stretching his neck muscles, and took in a great yawn with jaws lined with ivory spikes. Inside his cavernous stomach grumbled hollow.

He was Tyrannosaurus rex, tyrant lord of the jungle, and he had awoken hungry.

He craned his head up to scan his surroundings. Six monsoons had passed since he had carved his territory out after leaving his mother’s brood, and he had since mapped out its every tree, bush, and stone in his memory. He recognized that the ancient kapok tree he had rested underneath last night stood a few hours’ walking north of a river fed by waterfall, where game would gather to cool off once the heat reached its noontime peak. Between then and daybreak, they would browse the jungle glades for their morning meals.

And the tyrannosaur would make his own breakfast out of them.

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Why Europeans are Almost 1/3 African

Did you know that European people can attribute almost a third of their ancestry to additional migrations out of Africa?

It should be common knowledge by now that human beings in their modern form, Homo sapiens, first evolved in Africa. Exactly when we emerged on the scene remains uncertain (recent fossil discoveries suggest it may have happened over 300,000 years ago, a hundred millennia earlier than we originally thought), but whenever it was, most of our species’s history of existence would have played out on the so-called “Dark Continent”. It would have been no earlier than 70,000 years ago — and possibly as soon as 55,000 years ago — when the ancestors of all people outside of Africa would wander out of the continent and colonize the rest of the habitable world.

This would not have been the first dispersal of hominin apes out of Africa, mind you. Much in the press has been made of the fact that between 1–7% of modern human ancestry outside our ancestral continent comes from the descendants of earlier emigrants such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans. What may not be so widely publicized, however, is that the famous “Out of Africa” migration between 70–55,000 years ago would not have been the last movement of Homo sapiens from Africa into Eurasia and beyond, either. There is, in fact, a plethora of compelling evidence that humans from Africa continued to venture out and leave a permanent genetic mark on the ancestry of their Eurasian kin— even the “white” peoples of Europe.

I don’t mean a light dash, either. Almost one third of European ancestry descends from African admixture within the last 55,000 years.

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