
Ancient DNA Illuminates Pastoralism’s Rise in Africa - FossilHominid
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/pastoralism-ancient-dna-africa/
======
mc32
These are neat findings. Apparently Pastoralism (animal herding) began in the
Fertile Crescent and migrated through ancient Egypt (roughly around the time
of the early kingdoms) and migrated into subsaharan Africa—a slow process
where cattle (generic) were exchanged and traded but people, so far it seems,
didn’t intermix as much as one would think.

It’s only scratching the surface; the ancient DNA data for the region is
sparse, but it’s slowly contributing to a better picture of how people and
animal husbandry spread across continents, among other things.

------
0815test
Interesting. As far as human molecular-level evidence goes, we know that there
are significant traces of Middle-Eastern farmers in North Africa (including
Egypt and the north-east), but we can also tell that Nilotic herders expanded
out of Sudan, well into East Africa. West Africa is a bit complicated,
although the fact that we do find a large unified language family there (the
Niger-Congo-Kordofanian languages), even pre-Bantu expansion, must count for
something. These accounts should be taken with a grain of salt, since the
overall amount of genetic variation we find in the African continent already
implies that gene flow or replacement of any sort must have been quite rare
indeed - the picture we have for Africa is not nearly as sharp as the one that
emerges wrt. Eurasia as a result of the dramatic expansion of Yamnaya/PIE
horse herders in close-to-historical times.

~~~
iguy
I thought the Bantu expansion was both pretty uniform (until you get right out
to the ends) and much more recent than Yamnaya. But that among non-Bantu
populations you can find much older separations than among pre-Yamnaya
europeans.

But not an expert! Would be interested if there are more detailed recent
articles on this.

------
zeristor
Would it not be better to link to the original article, which this one refers
to at the top?

[https://theconversation.com/ancient-dna-is-revealing-the-
ori...](https://theconversation.com/ancient-dna-is-revealing-the-origins-of-
livestock-herding-in-africa-114387)

~~~
nograpes
They have a very recent scientific article (behind a paywall) describing their
work here:

[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/05/29/scie...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/05/29/science.aaw6275/tab-
figures-data)

