Small Namibian Tribe Has Genome Of 150,000 Years Ago

Thursday, December 4, 2014 - 15:40 in Biology & Nature

In the last 20,000 years, Europeans and Asians became numerous and their descendants now comprise the bulk of our 7 billion population. Prior to that, for 130,000 years, the Khoisan (they call themselves Bushmen), of Namibia reigned supreme. Their lifestyles remain relatively primitive. And genetically, they have not changed all that much either. They number only about 100,000 and a study in Nature Communications compared nearly all the genes of these individuals -- their genomes -- with the genomes of people from around the world, and discovered that the inflow of new genes into the Bushmen has been quite restricted the past 150,000 years. read more

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