Geographic context, of the samples used in this study. |
The thing about writing science books is that the moment you publish them they start to go out of date. The reason for this is obvious to anyone familiar with how science works and how knowledge is continually improving and being refined. Creationists, with their preference for certainty, no matter how false, over truth, this continual self-checking and self-revising nature of science is both baffling and disturbing.
As though to illustrate this point, no sooner had I put the finishing touches to my most recent book, "What Makes You So Special?", and submitted it for publication, than a paper was published that answered one of the mysteries that I alluded to in it. I had briefly covered, amongst other things, the origin of the Ancient Egyptians and their part of the human story. The mystery was who exactly the Ancient Egyptians were and where they came from.
The answer has been made possible by a new technique which has enabled DNA of sufficient quality to be extracted and compared to the DNA of other human groups. There is probably a lot more yet to come from these studies, including identifying what foreign incursions there were into Egypt in ancient times.