Web address:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/
090410075110.htm
Ancestors Of African Pygmies And Neighboring Farmers Separated Around 60,000
Years Ago
ScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2009) — All African Pygmies, inhabiting a large
territory extending west-to-east along Central Africa, descend from a unique
population who lived around 20,000 years ago, according to an international
study led by researchers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The research
concludes that the ancestors of present-day African Pygmies and farmers
separated ~60,000 years ago.
Pygmies are characterized by a forest-dwelling hunter-gathering lifestyle and
distinctive cultural practices and physical traits (e.g., low stature). Two
groups of Pygmy populations live in the African rainforests: the "Western
Pygmies" and the "Eastern Pygmies". The common origins of the two groups of
Pygmies, separated by thousands of kilometers, have been long debated, and
their relationships with neighboring farmers remained obscure.
The researchers, led by Lluis Quintana-Murci, studied the genetic profile of
twelve populations of Pygmies and neighboring farmers dispersed over the
African continent, using sequence data from non-coding regions of their
genomes. Using simulation-based procedures, they determined that the ancestors
of Pygmy hunter-gatherers and farming populations started to diverge ~60,000
years ago, coinciding with a period of important human migration both within
and outside Africa. Much later, ~20,000 years ago, Western and Eastern Pygmies
separated, concurrently with a period of climate change leading to large
retreats of the equatorial rainforest into refugia.
The common origin of all Pygmies unmasked in this study led Etienne Patin, one
of the leading authors, to conclude that "they have probably inherited their
distinctive shared physical traits, such as low height, from a common ancestor,
rather than by convergent adaptation to the rainforest". However, complete
genome-wide profiles of these populations are now needed, both to characterize
more precisely their demographic history and to identify genes involved in the
adaptation of these populations with different lifestyles to their specific
ecological habitats.
Journal reference:
1. Patin et al. Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and
Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set. PLoS Genetics,
2009; 5 (4): e1000448 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000448
Adapted from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!,
a service of AAAS.
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Public Library of Science (2009, April 11). Ancestors Of African Pygmies And
Neighboring Farmers Separated Around 60,000 Years Ago. ScienceDaily. Retrieved
April 16, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com
/releases/2009/04/090410075110.htm
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