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Review
. 2021 Apr 26;30(R1):R56-R63.
doi: 10.1093/hmg/ddaa274.

Bantu-speaker migration and admixture in southern Africa

Ananyo Choudhury  1 , Dhriti Sengupta  1 , Michele Ramsay  1 , Carina Schlebusch  2   3   4
Affiliations
Review

Bantu-speaker migration and admixture in southern Africa

Ananyo Choudhury et al. Hum Mol Genet. .

Abstract

The presence of Early and Middle Stone Age human remains and associated archeological artifacts from various sites scattered across southern Africa, suggests this geographic region to be one of the first abodes of anatomically modern humans. Although the presence of hunter-gatherer cultures in this region dates back to deep times, the peopling of southern Africa has largely been reshaped by three major sets of migrations over the last 2000 years. These migrations have led to a confluence of four distinct ancestries (San hunter-gatherer, East-African pastoralist, Bantu-speaker farmer and Eurasian) in populations from this region. In this review, we have summarized the recent insights into the refinement of timelines and routes of the migration of Bantu-speaking populations to southern Africa and their admixture with resident southern African Khoe-San populations. We highlight two recent studies providing evidence for the emergence of fine-scale population structure within some South-Eastern Bantu-speaker groups. We also accentuate whole genome sequencing studies (current and ancient) that have both enhanced our understanding of the peopling of southern Africa and demonstrated a huge potential for novel variant discovery in populations from this region. Finally, we identify some of the major gaps and inconsistencies in our understanding and emphasize the importance of more systematic studies of southern African populations from diverse ethnolinguistic groups and geographic locations.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Hunter-gatherer (Khoe-San and RFF) admixture and ancestry in Bantu-speaker groups from southern Africa. The pie charts corresponding to each population show Bantu-speaker ancestry in grey, Khoe-San in blue and RFF ancestry in green. The numbers in parenthesis below population names represent the corresponding admixture dates in terms of generations using GLOBETROTTER. Admixture dates inferred using MALDER are indicated by a ‘*’. The geographic positioning of groups within a country is only indicative and might not correspond to the actual location of sampling. Please see Supplementary Material, Table S1 for further details.
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