Washington - History records all the great pioneers as men, dating all the way back to the unknown early man who led his people out of Africa. But a genetic study published yesterday tells a different tale. Genes indicate that, throughout history, women have travelled farther afield than men and left a more permanent mark in the form of their DNA.
Dr Mark Seielstad of Harvard University and Dr Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University looked at mitochondrial DNA - the genetic material in a cell that is passed down untouched from mother to child.
Because it is not mixed up with the father's genes, like nuclear DNA, it provides a more accurate genetic historical record.
Writing in the journal Nature Genetics, Dr Seielstad's team said their checks of 14 African populations showed that variations in mitochondrial DNA were nearly eight times more widely dispersed than the different versions of the Y chromosome, which only men carry.
"If we really want to understand human migrations, we must pay more attention to women's ways," anthropologist Dr Mark Stoneking of Pennsylvania State University wrote in a commentary on the study. It may not have been "man the hunter" who dispersed his species around the globe, he said. "An emphasis on `woman the gatherer' would more accurately indicate who really brings home the bacon in most traditional hunter-gathering societies," Dr Stoneking said.