Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure

Overview

Journal Cell

Publisher Cell Press

Specialty Cell Biology

Date 2017 Sep 23

PMID 28938123

Citations 144

Authors

Pontus Skoglund

Jessica C Thompson

Mary E Prendergast

Alissa Mittnik

Kendra Sirak

Mateja Hajdinjak

Tasneem Salie

Nadin Rohland

Swapan Mallick

Alexander Peltzer

Anja Heinze

Inigo Olalde

Matthew Ferry

Eadaoin Harney

Megan Michel

Kristin Stewardson

Jessica I Cerezo-Roman

Chrissy Chiumia

Alison Crowther

Elizabeth Gomani-Chindebvu

Agness O Gidna

Katherine M Grillo

I Taneli Helenius

Garrett Hellenthal

Richard Helm

Mark Horton

Saioa Lopez

Audax Z P Mabulla

John Parkington

Ceri Shipton

Mark G Thomas

Ruth Tibesasa

Menno Welling

Vanessa M Hayes

Douglas J Kennett

Raj Ramesar

Matthias Meyer

Svante Paabo

Nick Patterson

Alan G Morris

Nicole Boivin

Ron Pinhasi

Johannes Krause

David Reich

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

We assembled genome-wide data from 16 prehistoric Africans. We show that the anciently divergent lineage that comprises the primary ancestry of the southern African San had a wider distribution in the past, contributing approximately two-thirds of the ancestry of Malawi hunter-gatherers ∼8,100-2,500 years ago and approximately one-third of the ancestry of Tanzanian hunter-gatherers ∼1,400 years ago. We document how the spread of farmers from western Africa involved complete replacement of local hunter-gatherers in some regions, and we track the spread of herders by showing that the population of a ∼3,100-year-old pastoralist from Tanzania contributed ancestry to people from northeastern to southern Africa, including a ∼1,200-year-old southern African pastoralist. The deepest diversifications of African lineages were complex, involving either repeated gene flow among geographically disparate groups or a lineage more deeply diverging than that of the San contributing more to some western African populations than to others. We finally leverage ancient genomes to document episodes of natural selection in southern African populations. PAPERCLIP.

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