My usual habit when I get the National Geographic magazine is to flip through and look at all the pictures. Then I go back and read the letters where I find out what I should have read two months ago. Not this month however! As I was flipping through the pages of the September 2009 issue, I came across the “Big Idea”. And the big idea was a quick look at their Genographic Project. I anxiously read the article immediately. My mind raced back to memories of one of my favourite books based on the work of Bryan Sykes at Oxford Ancestors which I blogged in an earlier posting. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts is a book about the peopling of Britain which compares written and anecdotal history with markers found on the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. On a much larger scale, the National Geographic Society has been looking at similar DNA markers and “retracing the ancient history of human migrations” since humans moved out of Africa around 200,000 years ago. You can learn a great deal more about National Geographic’s Genographic Project on their website. I can see where I will be spending some time reading in the near future.