RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Ancient genomes from southern Africa pushes modern human divergence beyond 260,000 years ago
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 145409
DO 10.1101/145409
A1 Carina M. Schlebusch
A1 Helena Malmström
A1 Torsten Günther
A1 Per Sjödin
A1 Alexandra Coutinho
A1 Hanna Edlund
A1 Arielle R. Munters
A1 Maryna Steyn
A1 Himla Soodyall
A1 Marlize Lombard
A1 Mattias Jakobsson
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/05/145409.abstract
AB Southern Africa is consistently placed as one of the potential regions for the evolution of Homo sapiens. To examine the region’s human prehistory prior to the arrival of migrants from East and West Africa or Eurasia in the last 1,700 years, we generated and analyzed genome sequence data from seven ancient individuals from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Three Stone Age hunter-gatherers date to ~2,000 years ago, and we show that they were related to current-day southern San groups such as the Karretjie People. Four Iron Age farmers (300–500 years old) have genetic signatures similar to present day Bantu-speakers. The genome sequence (13x coverage) of a juvenile boy from Ballito Bay, who lived ~2,000 years ago, demonstrates that southern African Stone Age hunter-gatherers were not impacted by recent admixture; however, we estimate that all modern-day Khoekhoe and San groups have been influenced by 9–22% genetic admixture from East African/Eurasian pastoralist groups arriving >1,000 years ago, including the Ju|‘hoansi San, previously thought to have very low levels of admixture. Using traditional and new approaches, we estimate the population divergence time between the Ballito Bay boy and other groups to beyond 260,000 years ago. These estimates dramatically increases the deepest divergence amongst modern humans, coincide with the onset of the Middle Stone Age in sub-Saharan Africa, and coincide with anatomical developments of archaic humans into modern humans as represented in the local fossil record. Cumulatively, cross-disciplinary records increasingly point to southern Africa as a potential (not necessarily exclusive) ‘hot spot’ for the evolution of our species.