The Khoisan hunter-gatherers of Namibia offer a glimpse of our ancestors' great genetic diversity. -- Stephan C. Schuster, Penn State University
Posted on 12/07/2014 8:52:29 PM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
The Khoisan hunter-gatherers of Namibia offer a glimpse of our ancestors' great genetic diversity. -- Stephan C. Schuster, Penn State University
The South African Defense Force used these guys as trackers and scouts in Namibia and Angola during the Border War in the ‘80s. Their ability to track through the bush was unmatched...give ‘em a rifle and a canteen, and they’d do the rest. And they were *fast* too.
and if it was your misfortune to have to track them, well it was a job rich in frustration . . .
Thanks M1903A1.
Look like Bushmen to me. Do they have the constant semi-erect penis mentioned in other writings by Peter Hathaway Capstick?
That guy looks like the guy that found the Coke bottle that somebody threw out of an airplane. ;^)
:’)
The Bushmen explaining coke to the baboon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT3dJBeo_zA
So does that mean the rest of humanity was severely inbred...?
They don’t really speak by “clicking”.
Their ‘constant semi-erect penises’ are actually a metal clicker sheath.
When they speak with a white man, they like to play with it.
There is no charge for this information.
That is a very good movie. Thanks.
Actually, the guy featured in “The Gods Must Be Crazy” was one of these folks.
A Khoisan, Swahili and a Bantu walked into a redneck bar...
The gods must be crazy.
There are somewhere around 350M people speaking Bantu languages.
Why does the phrase "lies, damned lies, and statistics" come to mind?
They used to have the largest population on the planet back in the days when they weren’t being bopped on the head with Coke bottles.
I remember George Wallace when he was running for President denouncing foreign aid as "sending money to the Hottentots in Yugoslavia."
Geography wasn't his strong suit.
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