Khoisan hunter-gatherers have been the largest population throughout most of modern-human demographic history

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Abstract

The Khoisan people from Southern Africa maintained ancient lifestyles as hunter-gatherers or pastoralists up to modern times, though little else is known about their early history. Here we infer early demographic histories of modern humans using whole-genome sequences of five Khoisan individuals and one Bantu speaker. Comparison with a 420 K SNP data set from worldwide individuals demonstrates that two of the Khoisan genomes from the Ju/'hoansi population contain exclusive Khoisan ancestry. Coalescent analysis shows that the Khoisan and their ancestors have been the largest populations since their split with the non-Khoisan population ∼ 100-150 kyr ago. In contrast, the ancestors of the non-Khoisan groups, including Bantu-speakers and non-Africans, experienced population declines after the split and lost more than half of their genetic diversity. Paleoclimate records indicate that the precipitation in southern Africa increased ∼ 80-100 kyr ago while west-central Africa became drier. We hypothesize that these climate differences might be related to the divergent-ancient histories among human populations.

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Kim, H. L., Ratan, A., Perry, G. H., Montenegro, A., Miller, W., & Schuster, S. C. (2014). Khoisan hunter-gatherers have been the largest population throughout most of modern-human demographic history. Nature Communications. Nature Publishing Group. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms6692

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