The Long Journey of My Little Y Chromosomes

<p>From a young age I wanted to trace my family’s history hoping to get back to the very beginning of modern mankind – seemingly a ridiculous and impossible task! However inspiration came to me in the 1950s whilst serving in the Royal Air Force. I was stationed for two years at Castel Benito in Libya which was situated on a sandy unmetalled road leading from Tripoli into the Sahara. Many times it intrigued me to see people passing our camp on foot – some with shoes some without all with differing skin colours and facial features. I realised many of them must have walked hundreds or even thousands of miles across the desert towards Tripoli hoping for a better life. A few of them obviously came from tropical Africa with their ebony skin; some were the Tuaregs and other tribes of the desert with their much-weathered dark-brown skin; and others were the Arabs of North Africa with their lighter olive-brown skin all in comparison to the former colonial Italians with their tanned white skin. I was determined then to learn all about human migrations and the evolution that went along with them.</p>