Thursday, October 8, 2015

All Africans have some Eurasian admixture?

Llorente et al.

Characterizing genetic diversity in Africa is a crucial step for most analyses reconstructing the evolutionary history of anatomically modern humans. However, historic migrations from Eurasia into Africa have affected many contemporary populations, confounding inferences. Here, we present a 12.5x coverage ancient genome of an Ethiopian male (‘Mota’) who lived approximately 4,500 years ago. We use this genome to demonstrate that the Eurasian backflow into Africa came from a population closely related to Early Neolithic farmers, who had colonized Europe 4,000 years earlier. The extent of this backflow was much greater than previously reported, reaching all the way to Central, West and Southern Africa, affecting even populations such as Yoruba and Mbuti, previously thought to be relatively unadmixed, who harbor 6-7% Eurasian ancestry.

Link to study

2 comments:

  1. This study was updated, apparently there was an error in the software and the scientists who wrote the article updated it. They have found that Central and West African populations do not carry this admixture from the Mota man found in Ethiopia.

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    Replies
    1. Yes... I blogged about that:

      http://anthromadness.blogspot.ae/2016/01/the-mota-mistake.html

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