A new paper published in Nature (Ancient West African foragers in the context of African population history, Mark Lipson, Isabelle Ribot, David Reich. Nature 577, 665–670 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1929-1) tells us about the admixture going on in Africa some thousands of years ago:
The paper's highlights are:
- They sequenced the DNA of four children from Shum Laka in Cameroon buried on two separate occasions (two of the children were buried 8,000 years ago, the other two, 3,000 years ago).
- One of them carried the oldest and most divergent Y chromosome haplogroup: A00
- Their model implies that these children belong to the fourth group that originated modern human lineages. There were three more groups: (i) from which modern Khoisan people descend from. (ii) Ancestral group to the East Africans. (iii) An exinct "ghost" population. These groups are some 250 ky old.
Science tells us more about the extinct group (iii): "Another two-thirds of children’s DNA came from an ancient "basal" source in West Africa, including some from a "long lost ghost population of modern humans that we didn’t know about before" says population geneticist David Reich of Harvard University, leader of the study."
And even more interesting is that "...the Shum Laka individuals are most related to present day rainforest hunter-gatherers [pygmies] and not ancestors of Bantu-speakers is surprising given that Shum Laka was long considered by archeologist[s] as the site where Bantu-speaker culture [was] developing in situ," (from LiveScience)
These four children are therefore not related to the modern Africans living in Cameroon or to the Bantu speakers who spread out across Africa. Instead they are closer to the pygmies of Central Africa!
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2020 by Austin Whittall ©
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