A journey of 70 thousand years from East Africa to Sardinia. The extraordinary reportage that opens the new issue of SardiniaPost Magazine. The author, Daniela Pani, joining the Genographic Project, through her DNA test has rebuilt her “remote family tree” starting from the African “paleo-grandmother” who lived at the foot of the Semien Mountains, the birthplace of the legendary Blue Nile. A journey that tells us about the human colonisation of the World, and explains the story of all of us.
We all started from Africa and we lived there for tens of thousands of years up to when the climatic effects of the several Ice Ages opened green corridors in the desert – what we now call the Sahara desert – that allowed us to move to the North, reaching Asia and then continue our journey to every corner of planet Earth.
Daniela Pani tells us that her “paleo-grandmother”, a niece of the African one, 40 thousand years ago lived in the Middle East and there she met the Neanderthals. She explains that the meeting was very intense, to the point that in her DNA a certain percentage of the Neanderthal DNA is still detectable.
Many years later (about 20 thousands) the granddaughters of the Asian “paleo-grandmother” reached the South of France, the current French Riviera and finally, about 6 thousand years B.C., they decided to reach that Island some day later named Sardinia. A scientific report likewise a novel. A complex yet very simple story that tells us about our common belonging to one race, the human race. To make a humorous tribute to her African grandmothers, with the help of a little ‘make-up and wearing a typical traditional Sardinian costume on dark skin, the author has symbolically taken the shape of her ancient Granny
Some other millennium later we learned how to organise life. We began to put huge stones one above the other, and we built the nuraghi. This is, however, almost nowaday history, as compared as to the journey we narrate.
(Questa è la versione in inglese dell’articolo che presenta il reportage di Daniela Pani, pubblicato sul suo sito. Un viaggio durato 70mila anni, la copertina del terzo numero di SardiniaPost magazine.
