African population history: an ancient DNA perspective. | Semantic Scholar

How technology and population genetic methods have advanced to give more detailed inferences about population structure, migrations, admixture patterns, timing of admixture, sex-biased admixtures, and inferences of selection and adaptive introgression in rainforest hunter-gatherers and other African populations is reviewed.

DNA analysis of 6 individuals from eastern and south-central Africa spanning the past approximately 18,000 years, and of 28 previously published ancient individuals, provides genetic evidence supporting hypotheses of increasing regionalization at the end of the Pleistocene.

Recent progress deriving from paleogenomic analysis is reviewed, which helps to reconstruct the prehistory of China.

The continued development in the ancient DNA field has transformed the understanding of human genetic history and will keep uncovering the further mysteries of the authors' recent evolutionary past.

It is shown for the first time that genetic diversity amongst Bantu-speaking populations declines with distance from western Africa, with current-day Zambia and the DRC as possible crossroads of interaction.

It has become evident that deep African population history is captured by relationships among African hunter-gatherers, as the world's deepest population divergences occur among these groups, and that the deepest population divergence dates to 300,000 years before present.

A detailed genetic analysis of most major groups of African populations is provided, suggesting that Africans represent 14 ancestral populations that correlate with self-described ethnicity and shared cultural and/or linguistic properties.

An Africa-wide phylogeny is infer that features widespread admixture and three prominent radiations, including one that gave rise to at least four major lineages deep in the history of modern humans.

The analysis of the genetic diversity of Bantu speakers revealed adaptive introgression of genes that likely originated in other African populations, including specific immune-related genes, and applied this information to African Americans suggests that gene flow from Africa into the Americas was more complex than previously thought.

Ancient DNA has the potential to untangle patterns of movement and interaction underlying this economic and cultural transition, and complex spreads of herding and farming in eastern Africa involving multiple movements of ancestrally distinct peoples as well as gene flow among these groups are suggested.

Genetic variation in various sub-Saharan populations did not localize the origin of modern humans to a single geographic region within Africa; instead, it indicated a history of admixture and stratification, and illustrated the importance of African genomic diversity in understanding human evolutionary history.

The southern African Khoisan fall into two genetic groups, loosely corresponding to the northwestern and southeastern Kalahari, which are shown separated within the last 30,000 years.

The genome of an Ethiopian male, “Mota,” who lived approximately 4500 years ago is sequenced to demonstrate that the Eurasian backflow into Africa came from a population closely related to Early Neolithic farmers, who had colonized Europe 4000 years earlier.

The first modern human population divergence time is estimated to be between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago, which increases the deepest divergence among modern humans, coinciding with anatomical developments of archaic humans intomodern humans, as represented in the local fossil record.