An analysis of ancient DNA from six individuals from southeastern Africa offers a glimpse of the lives, movements, and relations of people who occupied the continent between 18,000 and 5000 years ago.
Africa is the birthplace of our species, but ancient DNA from the continent has so far provided relatively few clues to our history there, partly because researchers have struggled to recover genetic samples that survived the hot, humid climate. Now,offers a glimpse of the lives, movements, and relations of people who occupied the continent between 18,000 and 5000 years ago; it also hints at the complex commingling of African populations even further back.
Their model suggests the 34 individuals descend from three major source populations. Two of them, from northeastern Africa and southern Africa, were already known. But the third population, from Central Africa and most closely related to people today who live a foraging lifestyle there, came as a surprise.
But that time frame for commingling matches developments in material culture, says co-author Mary Prendergast, an archaeologist at Rice University. In African artifacts of that period, “we see a ton of hints that people are connecting in different ways,” she says, mixing and matching artifacts from distant places.
That date range marks the Last Glacial Maximum, which affected climate worldwide, points out Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Across tropical Africa, forests contracted and grasslands grew in between, forming fragmented savannalike “islands” for many species—perhaps humans among them. “It’s interesting to think about whether sub-Saharan African foragers were mapping onto a kind of refugium model.
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