Gene M130 is a marker of the first human migration out of Africa. R M Pitchappan, who teaches immunology at the Madurai Kamaraj University in Tamil Nadu, tells Narayani Ganesh that he found this in the DNA of members of a community in a village near Madurai: Are Indians the first ever migrants out of Africa? The first human migration occurred 50-70,000 years ago when we moved out of Africa and into India through the coastal region via the land bridge when sea levels were low. We have found traces (gene markers) of this migration in communities living near Madurai; so Indians might be the first human migrants. Do our genes carry evidence of cultural evolution? If culture means the way we evolved to subsist and survive... maybe. But there is no direct link. How did ancients eat, what was their mode of subsistence? We learnt by trial and error. Rice was wild weed. Collecting grain eventually led to organised cultivation and society formation. Technology helped us move from being foragers, hunter-gatherers, dry and then wetland farmers to farming and irrigating any kind of land, anywhere. The hunter-gatherer's body evolved to deal with the malaria menace. Tribal populations in India have red blood corpuscles shaped like a sickle that inhibits malarial infection. This is a natural selection phenomenon for survival. If you call all this culture, then, yes, it might be reflected in our genes. Culture is the summation of all past experiences of earlier generations. In the teledocumentary, The Story of India, Michael Wood, while covering 50,000 years of human history, is all praise for India's heritage. Isn't there a flip side to tracing our origins that promotes race theories? This is really human history. It will promote understanding. As Oxford scientist Spencer Wells would say, all of us are literally Africans... brothers and sisters separated by 2,000 generations. The inferiority-superiority theorising is a mindset problem. Anyway, no caste is pure. It cannot be. Any pairing that can create progeny is a viable species. Caste was merely a social institution that has come to be abused. It is societal stratification, now happening in the West, crystallising in people of similar professions raising a family together. So the caste system is not static; it is a dynamic social institution that absorbs changes. Caste classifications only reiterate that differences between individuals and communities are quite trivial when compared to the 120,000 year-old evolutionary history of humans. Why don't we look at the more important aspect? Africa is the birthplace of humankind but people there continue to suffer due to appalling living conditions.