Genetic signs of reverse migrations had been spotted before. Over the past decade, evidence has accrued that people returned to Africa after the original ‘out of Africa’ event. And more recently, DNA data suggest that a small group of east Africans migrated to southern Africa to mix with the hunter-gatherers who lived there 2,000 years ago. A new analysis connects these two migrations. In a paper posted on the preprint server arXiv on 30 July, population geneticists at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, report their use of a method to identify traces of this two-step migration within DNA of the minority Khoe-San ethnic groups of southern Africa (J. K. Pickrell et al. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/1307.8014; 2013).
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 12:11:48 +0000