THE narrow Strait of Gibraltar was a more effective barrier to early human
migration than the whole of the Sahara, geneticists claim.
David Comas of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and his colleagues
analysed 676 individuals from north-western Africa and the Iberian peninsula.
They studied gene fragments called Alu sequences which are recent arrivals in
the human genome. Two people with the same Alu sequence at the same point in
their genome are highly likely to have had common ancestors.
“The genetic background of the North African and the Iberian populations is
different. There has been little gene flow…
