The brotherhood of mankind has ancient roots. In the remote shadows of human pre-history, there was only a single primitive culture. "Genetic tracking" is a new science but it indicates that "modern" man existed as a hunter-gatherer in eastern Africa around 150,000 years ago, with evidence of these same people discovered in the Middle East dated from around 80,000 years ago. A well-researched hypothesis that all humans are descended from a "mitochondrial" Eve (a reference to the mitochondrial DNA traced to a female ancestor living in east Africa 150,000 years, or about 7,000 generations, ago) emphasizes the "commonality" of all humans and our descent from a single "race." At one point, there were probably only around 10,000 humans in the world, and they gradually migrated, leaving a DNA trail behind them. Stephen Oppenheimer (author of Out of Eden - The Peopling of the World), among others, suggests a single major "exodus" out of Africa, not necessarily many waves of emigration as was previously theorized. This theory is supported by geneticists such as Spencer Wells (author of The Journey of Man - A Genetic Odyssey and director of the Genographic Project). Genetic drift would have resulted in a single line of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) surviving in isolated populations.Genetics & Anthropology in Sicily http://www.bestofsicily.com/genetics.htm "Norman Sicily stood forth in Europe --and indeed in the whole bigoted medieval world-- as an example of tolerance and enlightenment, a lesson in the respect that every man should feel for those whose blood and beliefs happen to differ from his own." -- John Julius Norwich, The Kingdom in the Sun 1970 "Sicilians are a diverse people, having had contact with a great variety of ethnic stocks and physical types throughout the centuries." -- Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 10, page 779 1997