Researchers have reconstructed the oldest human genomes ever found in South Africa, from two individuals who lived about 10,000 years ago, providing insights into the region’s demographic history, a scientist who helped prepare the study said Sunday.
The genetic sequence comes from a man and a woman whose remains were found at the Oakhurst rock shelter near the town of George on the south coast, said Victoria Gibbon, a professor of biological anthropology at the University of Cape Town.
This sequence is one of 13 reconstructed from individuals found in the shelter who lived between 1,300 and 10,000 years ago.
Prior to these discoveries, the oldest genomes reconstructed in the region date back nearly two thousand years.
The university explained, in a statement, that the Oakhurst study surprisingly reveals that the oldest genomes were genetically similar to those of the San and Khoikhoi groups that live in the same area today.
“Similar studies in Europe have revealed a history of widespread genetic changes due to human movements over the past 10,000 years,” the statement quoted the study’s lead author, Joshua Gretzinger, as saying.
“These new findings from southern Africa are completely different and point to a long history of relative genetic stability,” added Gretzinger, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Current DNA data shows that this only changed about 1,200 years ago, when newcomers introduced pastoralism, agriculture, and new languages to the region, and began interacting with local hunting groups.
Gibbon said it might be possible to find some of the oldest traces of modern humans in South Africa, but they are generally not well preserved. New techniques are now making it possible to obtain this DNA, she added.
Unlike Europe and Asia, where the genomes of thousands of people have been reconstructed, fewer than twenty ancient genomes have been found in southern Africa, specifically in Botswana, South Africa and Zambia.
“Sites like this are rare in South Africa,” Gibbon noted, noting that Oakhurst’s study “provided insight into the movements and relationships of local peoples (…) over a period of some nine thousand years.”
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