Is it possible to touch the antiquity? Not to the works of ancient sculptors and builders, but to the epochs that have long been in the past? Living in the modern world, we rarely think about how long man has inhabited the Earth. It all started millions of years ago, when the first hominids stood on their hind legs and learned how to create primitive tools. The modern era with writing, cities and states is just a moment compared to the times when a few tribes of our ancestors migrated across the continents...

Interested in knowing how two people are related on much shorter time scales? Check out the most accurate relationship predictor. Most people who are interested in the study of ancient human migrations believe that multiple branches of humans split off from an ancestral population that originated in Africa and, until recently, that those branches remained mostly separate from each other to the present day. Is every part of that statement true? In his fascinating book “A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived,” Adam Rutherford makes the astounding claim that all humans alive today share a most recent common ancestor (MRCA) from somewhere between 3,400 and 3,600 years ago, i...