Dwindling African tribe may have been most populous group on planet

Science ^ | 4 December 2014 | Ann Gibbons

[SunkenCiv]

...for tens of thousands of years, the Khoisan's ancestors were members of "the largest population" on the planet, according to a new study.

The Khoisan have long stood apart from other groups within Africa. They look distinct, speak in "click" languages, and have also maintained the greatest genetic diversity known among human populations. Usually, big populations harbor the most diversity. But census counts show that the 100,000 Khoisan speakers in Africa today are far outnumbered by other groups, such as the 45 million Bantu speakers and their 180 million descendants who now speak Swahili and other languages. Researchers have thought that the Khoisan inherited their genetic diversity from a large ancestral population, an idea supported by a single Khoisan genome published in 2012. But scientists couldn't rule out that the variation in Khoisan DNA arose from more recent interbreeding with other diverse Africans.

In the new study, published online today in Nature Communications, biochemist Stephan Schuster of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and colleagues sequenced the complete genomes of five Khoisan hunter-gatherers from Namibia and compared them with the DNA from 1462 genomes of people from around the world. Schuster's team found that two of the Khoisan, members of the Ju/'hoansi population in Namibia, inherited their DNA only from Khoisan ancestors in the northern Kalahari region and showed no sign of interbreeding with non-Khoisan speakers. These two Ju/'hoansi genomes preserve ancient diversity inherited entirely from their direct ancestors, the authors say.

Using several different methods of analysis, the team reconstructed population sizes for the ancestors of the Khoisan, as well as for Europeans, Asians, and another African group, the Yoruba.

[SunkenCiv]

Hey, if I were a Hottentot and wanted to emigrate, I probably would pick Yugosl- uh, never mind. ;’)

[blam]

"Look like Bushmen to me. Do they have the constant semi-erect penis mentioned in other writings by Peter Hathaway Capstick?"

The female vagina is different too.

[blam]

The Hottentot Venus

[blam]

One anthropologist suggested that they were the Leprechauns of Irish legend.

[colorado tanker]

An excellent movie. Highly recommended!

[laplata]

Yes, an excellent movie. Thanks, colorado tanker.

I’ll have to watch it again.

[colorado tanker]

The Khoisan then began a more drastic decline in the past 20,000 years or so, with a major blow when the Bantu farmers spread through Africa 4000 years ago. “This shows us how much climate can influence populations,” says genomicist Webb Miller of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, a co-author.

Wow, there's a non-sequitur. Bantu farmers putting pressure on the Khoisan habitat is "climate change"???

Does everything in academe these day have to link to "climate change" to get backing?

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

“An excellent movie. Highly recommended!”

That is on my list of all-time favorites.

[SunkenCiv]

Yeah, it’s completely ridiculous. Lake Victoria completely dried up though, 12K years ago, and the Sahara dried out to the point that Lake Tritonis was nearly but not quite gone when Herodotus visited Africa.

[Little Bill]

Herodotus also pointed out the Pygmies were living in the area around Lake Chad.

A question that I have asked many times is, Why Remnant Peoples in South Africa, the Adman Islands, and others are pushed out by others from NE to South.