Ancient DNA Illuminates Pastoralism’s Rise in Africa

These are neat findings. Apparently Pastoralism (animal herding) began in the Fertile Crescent and migrated through ancient Egypt (roughly around the time of the early kingdoms) and migrated into subsaharan Africa—a slow process where cattle (generic) were exchanged and traded but people, so far it seems, didn’t intermix as much as one would think.

It’s only scratching the surface; the ancient DNA data for the region is sparse, but it’s slowly contributing to a better picture of how people and animal husbandry spread across continents, among other things.

Interesting. As far as human molecular-level evidence goes, we know that there are significant traces of Middle-Eastern farmers in North Africa (including Egypt and the north-east), but we can also tell that Nilotic herders expanded out of Sudan, well into East Africa. West Africa is a bit complicated, although the fact that we do find a large unified language family there (the Niger-Congo-Kordofanian languages), even pre-Bantu expansion, must count for something. These accounts should be taken with a grain of salt, since the overall amount of genetic variation we find in the African continent already implies that gene flow or replacement of any sort must have been quite rare indeed - the picture we have for Africa is not nearly as sharp as the one that emerges wrt. Eurasia as a result of the dramatic expansion of Yamnaya/PIE horse herders in close-to-historical times.

Would it not be better to link to the original article, which this one refers to at the top?

https://theconversation.com/ancient-dna-is-revealing-the-ori...