Did Early Humans Go North or South?

When the first early humans ventured out of Africa, which way did they go? Studies of maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA are revealing the excursion choices of our earliest ancestors. In their Perspective, Forster and Matsumura discuss two new studies of the mitochondrial DNA of the indigenous peoples of Malaysia and the Andaman islands ( Macaulay et al., Thangaraj et al.). These studies suggest that the earliest humans took a southern route along the coastline of the Indian Ocean before fanning out over the rest of the world.