Over the past decade, ancient DNA research has revealed some surprising aspects to our evolutionary history during the past 50,000 years. Perhaps the most startling of these has been the extent to which the ancestors of living people across the planet interbred with other closely related species of human. There's no doubt that different groups of people can look very different from one another. Some genes are involved in observable characteristic differences, and some are involved in musculature-related phenomena.

Many people focus on these, ignoring the vast majority of genes whose differences are insignificant. As migration increases around the Philippines, and the world, features that might previously have allowed our eyes to classify people will undoubtedly become blurred.

Then the small fraction of DNA differences that differ between populations will become even smaller. In the ancient Philippines, these DNA differences were explained by myth and folklore. Two such stories from the Ibaloi people of the Northern Philippines involve Star Maidens who came from the sky.

#Ibaloi #StarMaidens