GENETICISTS REDISCOVER AFRICAN POPULATION ONCE ASSUMED TO HAVE DIED OUT

Mon 02 October 2023:

Researchers face obvious challenges in understanding the early humans who walked the Earth before us, but modern DNA analysis is providing new clues about ancient peoples in the cradle of mankind.

Preserving linguistic heritage is a priority for many scientists as it’s estimated nine human languages become extinct every year. But genetic analysis of a recently-analyzed population in Africa demonstrates genetic links may remain even as languages are lost.

The research was carried out by a multinational team of academics from Switzerland, Portugal and Germany. The group studied a population of people in the Namib desert in Angola, traveling to a remote region of many ethnicities and traditions.

“We were able to locate groups which were thought to have disappeared more than 50 years ago,” said Jorge Rocha, a population geneticist from the Center of Investigation in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources in Porto, Portugal.

Key to the discovery was the pastoral nature of the Kwepe people, who raise livestock in the region. The people previously spoke a language called Kwadi, which shared common linguistic ancestors with languages spoken by other peoples who engaged in foraging and herding in southern Africa.

“In agreement with our previous studies on the maternally-inherited DNA, most genome-wide diversity segregates according to socio-economic status,” said study author Sandra Oliveira, of the University of Bern in Switzerland.

In other words, what we do for a living and how successful we are helps predict the genetics we will pass down, researchers pointed out.

The paper, entitled “Genome-wide variation in the Angolan Namib Desert reveals unique pre-Bantu ancestry,” was published in the Science Advances journal.

The findings were also authored by Anne-Maria Fehn, Beatriz Amorim and Jorge Rocha from the University of Porto in Portugal, as well as Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

-Sputnik

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