Dispersals and genetic adaptation of Bantu-speaking populations in Africa and North America.

Bantu languages are spoken by about 310 million Africans, yet the genetic history of Bantu-speaking populations remains largely unexplored. We generated genomic data for 1318 individuals from 35 populations in western central Africa, where Bantu languages originated. We found that early Bantu speakers first moved southward, through the equatorial rainforest, before spreading toward eastern and southern Africa.

Sociocultural behavior, sex-biased admixture, and effective population sizes in Central African Pygmies and non-Pygmies.

Sociocultural phenomena, such as exogamy or phylopatry, can largely determine human sex-specific demography. In Central Africa, diverging patterns of sex-specific genetic variation have been observed between mobile hunter-gatherer Pygmies and sedentary agricultural non-Pygmies. However, their sex-specific demography remains largely unknown.

Insights into the demographic history of African Pygmies from complete mitochondrial genomes.

Pygmy populations are among the few hunter-gatherers currently living in sub-Saharan Africa and are mainly represented by two groups, Eastern and Western, according to their current geographical distribution. They are scattered across the Central African belt and surrounded by Bantu-speaking farmers, with whom they have complex social and economic interactions. To investigate the demographic history of Pygmy groups, a population approach was applied to the analysis of 205 complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from ten central African populations.

Genetic and demographic implications of the Bantu expansion: insights from human paternal lineages.

The expansion of Bantu languages, which started around 5,000 years before present in west/central Africa and spread all throughout sub-Saharan Africa, may represent one of the major and most rapid demographic movements in the history of the human species. Although the genetic footprints of this expansion have been unmasked through the analyses of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA lineages, information on the genetic impact of this massive movement and on the genetic composition of pre-Bantu populations is still scarce. Here, we analyze an extensive collection of Y-chromosome markers--41 single nucleotide polymorphisms and 18 short tandem repeats--in 883 individuals from 22 Bantu-speaking agriculturalist populations and 3 Pygmy hunter-gatherer populations from Gabon and Cameroon.

Inferring the demographic history of African farmers and pygmy hunter-gatherers using a multilocus resequencing data set.

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming involved a major cultural innovation that has spread rapidly over most of the globe in the last ten millennia. In sub-Saharan Africa, hunter-gatherers have begun to shift toward an agriculture-based lifestyle over the last 5,000 years. Only a few populations still base their mode of subsistence on hunting and gathering.

Origins and genetic diversity of pygmy hunter-gatherers from Western Central Africa.

Central Africa is currently peopled by numerous sedentary agriculturalist populations neighboring the largest group of mobile hunter-gatherers, the Pygmies [1-3]. Although archeological remains attest to Homo sapiens' presence in the Congo Basin for at least 30,000 years, the demographic history of these groups, including divergence and admixture, remains widely unknown [4-6]. Moreover, it is still debated whether common history or convergent adaptation to a forest environment resulted in the short stature characterizing the pygmies [2, 7].

Maternal traces of deep common ancestry and asymmetric gene flow between Pygmy hunter-gatherers and Bantu-speaking farmers.

Two groups of populations with completely different lifestyles-the Pygmy hunter-gatherers and the Bantu-speaking farmers-coexist in Central Africa. We investigated the origins of these two groups and the interactions between them, by analyzing mtDNA variation in 1,404 individuals from 20 farming populations and 9 Pygmy populations from Central Africa, with the aim of shedding light on one of the most fascinating cultural transitions in human evolution (the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture). Our data indicate that this region was colonized gradually, with an initial L1c-rich ancestral population ultimately giving rise to current-day farmers, who display various L1c clades, and to Pygmies, in whom L1c1a is the only surviving clade.