“This is the first ancient human genome found in Africa to have been sequenced”, said Marcos Gallego Llorente, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge and member of the global team of researchers who worked on the project.
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This ancient genome was then compared to the DNA of modern day Africans where East Africans apparently possess 45 percent of European ancestry due to this ancient migration and the rest of the populations of Africa also have at least six percent of their genome, originally from this Eurasian migration.
However, the 4,500-year-old remains of this hunter gatherer, known as Mota man, were found in a cave and were well preserved.
Most people are familiar with the idea that there was a migration of early humans who moved out of Africa to colonise Europe and Asia between 60,000 and 125,000 years ago.
Previously, it was thought that early Africans were less connected with the larger world population.
By analyzing the kinds of genes the Stone Age farmers carried to Africa, the scientists also found they were closely related to the same population that had brought agriculture to Europe about 7,000 years ago. Then a few populations, which became genetically distinct, came back to Africa and bred with the native African populations causing a genetic backflow. Knowing the genetic diversity in Africa is important in understanding the evolution of anatomically modern humans. This “backflow” of Eurasian DNA reaches across the entire continent, confirming the findings of a study of modern genomes that was published previous year.
Using Mota’s DNA, researchers have presented a theory that people from the “Near East” (now the Middle East) began moving into Africa about 3,000 years ago. “One genome from one individual can provide a picture of an entire population”, said Dr Manica.
With the specimen, scientists successfully sequenced an ancient genome from Africa for the first time.
The first complete ancient African Genome has been discovered from excavations in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia, a Kathryn Arthur archeology team in Ethiopia announced on Friday.
“I would bet it’s not that far in the future”, said Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand who recently announced the discovery of an ancient human-like species called Homo naledi.
But evidence of their return, reported in the journal Science, comes from a DNA analysis of an adult male buried face down 4,500 years ago in a cave in the Ethiopian highlands. When the back migration occurred, early Eurasians and Africans bred and their genes were mixed.
“Africa is a total melting pot”, said Gallego Llorente. So being able to get a snapshot from before these migration events occurred is a big step. In recent years, Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Dublin, and his colleagues have been surveying different bones to see if any are particularly good for preserving DNA.
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DNA was extracted from petrous bone of ancient human. Because it was widely suspected that the heat and humidity in the tropics would destroy genetic material, many scientists flocked to places like Siberia to search for ancient DNA.
