2004 paperback with 440 pages new and unread.

In 1988 Newsweek broke the news that everyone alive on the planet today carries DNA that can be traced back to a single woman living in Africa over 150,000 years ago. Modern humans are truly 'out of Africa'. But how, when and why we left our motherland was open to question and until very recently most experts believed that many waves of ex-African migration had resulted in a gradual populating of the world.

With a systhesis of new genetic, archaeological and climatic evidence, Stephen Oppenheimer challenges the orthodoxy by arguing that all modern non-Africans can be shown to have sprung from a single exodus. One migrant group of no more than a few hundred souls was forced out of its homeland by increasing salinity in the Red Sea, some 85,000 years ago, and all non-Africans today can trace their mitochondrial DNA to one woman from this group - the Out-of-Africa Eve.