Thursday, April 16, 2009

Y-Haplotypes in Africa

A new paper, Genetic and demographic implications of the Bantu expansion: insights from human paternal lineages, finds "a recent origin for most paternal lineages in west Central African populations most likely resulting from the expansion of Bantu-speaking farmers that erased the more ancient Y-chromosome diversity found in this area", although the same is not true for mtDNA analyses, and "some traces of ancient paternal lineages are observed in these populations, mainly among hunter-gatherers." Much more interestingly, "[w]e also find the intriguing presence of paternal lineages belonging to Eurasian haplogroup R1b1*, which might represent footprints of demographic expansions in central Africa not directly related to the Bantu expansion."

A quick overview of previous info at Wiki. Note that R1b1* means R1b1 without any further mutations (or returned to such state by back-mutation). R1b1 (without the asteroid) refers to the group of haplotypes with the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) M343, along with any and all further mutations.

Dienekes' Anthropology Blog (from whom I got the reference) has an informative article, with some info beyond the abstact: Paternal traces of Bantu expansion + African R1b1 mystery

Searching for other information on this subject, I found:

Bantu language trees reflect the spread of farming
across sub-Saharan Africa: a maximum-parsimony
analysis


Farmers and Their Languages:
The First Expansions


A Back Migration from Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa Is Supported by High-Resolution Analysis of Human Y-Chromosome Haplotypes also here

The phylogeography of Y chromosome binary haplotypes and the origins of
modern human populations


Phylogeographic Analysis of Haplogroup E3b (E-M215) Y Chromosomes Reveals Multiple Migratory Events Within and Out Of Africa

The Levant versus the Horn of Africa: Evidence for Bidirectional Corridors of Human Migrations

The Making of the African mtDNA Landscape

Variation of Female and Male Lineages in Sub-Saharan Populations: the Importance of Sociocultural Factors

Bantu and European Y-lineages in Sub-Saharan Africa

Map of Africa

Another map of Africa

Yet more, with climate data

One paper I could only find in abstract:

The genetic legacy of western Bantu migrations

2 comments:

  1. hey hey hey big up ma african ancestors (dont know if i spelt that right)

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  2. I am afraid our geneticists are basing their research on false "Bantu" theories of the 19nth century European bounty hunters.There is no such a thing as a "Bantu" gene.A Muntu from Cameroon and another from Tanzania are as diverse as a Chinese and an Arab of North Africa,or an English and a Russian.When studying various African community genes,please do so without the word Bantu,hamitic,nilotic and other colonial jungle terms.
    Israel

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