The genetic sequence comes from a man and a woman whose remains were found at Oakhurst Rock Shelter near the town of George on the south coast, said Victoria Gibbon, 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 about 2,000 years.
The university explained in a statement that Oakhurst’s study surprisingly reveals that the oldest genomes were genetically similar to those of the San and Khoikhoi groups that live in the same region today.
“Similar studies in Europe have revealed a history of widespread genetic changes due to human movements over the past 10,000 years,” the study’s lead author, Joshua Gretzinger, was quoted as saying in the statement.
“These new findings from southern Africa are quite 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 told AFP that it might be possible to find some of the oldest traces of modern humans in South Africa, but they are generally not well preserved. She added that new techniques are now making it possible to obtain this DNA.
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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