From Prehistory to Hippocrates

I swear by Apollo Physician and Asklepios and Hygeia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses., 

Having made a fast transit of the medical adventure of the human race until the end of time in Chapter 1, we will step back a little to pick up the record for the entwined story of civilization and medicine so that we can consider how the human infectious diseases arose. This will allow us to look at another kind of medical record the record of human history and its well-being and survival that we carry within our genes, as DNA, and its profound impact on modern medicine, especially molecular medicine. Our genetic history is also entwined with the migration of people and the rise of civilizations. We are the molecules of which we are made, and the story of migration and survival is the story of both. 

Our mission, in part, is to trace (at least roughly) the descent of the great Hippocrates, legendary founder of Western medicine. We will start with essentially modern humans, which biologists classify as follows  

The Engines of Hippocrates From the Dawn of Medicine to Medical and Pharmaceutical Informatics, by Barry Robson and O.K. Baek Copyright 2009 by John Wiley Sons, Inc. 

The ancestral Adam and Eve of everyone, in and out of Africa, makes us all brothers and sisters even more than we have recently thought. But to trace the line of descent to Hippocrates, we need to consider just a few Africans. These were Africans who began their new diaspora out of Africa a mere 50,000 to 80,000 years ago, perhaps at most 100,000 or so. We can track the journey out of Africa by mutations that survive today, called biomarkers. For example the Y chromosome of many non-Africans, called marker M168, defines Eurasian Adam, whose male ancestor lived 30,000 to 79,000 years ago but whose ancestors are still found in Eastern Africa and the Southern Middle East. Similarly a descendent of his acquired M45 in Central Eurasia north of India, but his descendants moved on west. So, though some of the descendants of these men still live in the vicinity of the places where the mutations occurred, they have spread to colonize northern Europe. The geographical distribution 

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