Colloquium paper: working toward a synthesis of archaeological, linguistic, and genetic data for inferring African population history

Abstract

Although Africa is the origin of modern humans, the pattern and distribution of genetic variation and correlations with cultural and linguistic diversity in Africa have been understudied. Recent advances in genomic technology, however, have led to genomewide studies of African samples. In this article, we discuss genetic variation in African populations contextualized with what is known about archaeological and linguistic variation. What emerges from this review is the importance of using independent lines of evidence in the interpretation of genetic and genomic data in the reconstruction of past population histories.

Fig. 1.

Map of Africa colored by the language family spoken in each region (adapted from ref. 29). The Afroasiatic language family is shown in purple, the Nilo-Saharan language family is shown in pink, the Khoesan language family is shown in blue, and the Niger-Kordofanian language family is shown in yellow.

Fig. 2.

Global map showing the frequency of the lactase persistence trait for populations reported in Ingram et al. (55) and citations therein. Lactase persistence is shaded in black.

Fig. 3.

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis of autosomal microsatellite data from Tishkoff et al. (1). A pairwise genetic distance matrix using (δμ)² (as described in ref. 1) was constructed for populations with a sample size of n ≥ 10 and used for MDS analysis. Populations are colored on the basis of linguistic affiliation. The Afroasiatic speakers are shown in purple, the Nilo-Saharan speakers are shown in pink, the Khoesan speakers are shown in blue, and the Niger-Kordofanian speakers are shown in yellow. The x axis represents dimension 1 and the y axis represents dimension 2.