LONDON: British scientists have for the first time sequenced an ancient African genome from a 4,500-year-old Ethiopian skull that has confirmed a massive wave of migration from Eurasia into Africa about 3,000 years ago.
The migration into the Horn of Africa had a genetic impact on modern African population with 25% of their DNA can be traced back to this event. “Every single person for which we have data in Africa has a sizeable component of Eurasian ancestry ,” said Dr Andrea Manica, who carried out the research.
The genome was taken from the skull of a man buried face-down 4,500 years ago in a cave called Mota in the highlands of Ethiopia.
Marcos Gallego Llorente, the first author of the paper from Cambridge’s department of Zoology , told TOI, ” This migration affected the genetic makeup of the African continent, reaching western, central and southern African populations, such as the Yoruba and Mbuti, which were previously thought to be relatively unadmixed, who harbor 6-7% Eurasian ancestry”.
“About the origins of modern man, the finding doesn’t say much, as we are talking about a migration in the last 4,000 years. Men left Africa for first time at least 60,000 years ago. This exemplifies that the world has been a very large melting pot of genes populations have always moved, and now we’ve seen an example of a very dramatic one,” Llorente said.
