ABOVE: Excavation of two boys who lived ~8,000 years and were buried at the Shum Laka rock shelter in Cameroon
PHOTO BY ISABELLE RIBOT, JANUARY 1994
Two pairs of children, who were buried in an ancient rock shelter known as Shum Laka in northwestern Cameroon some 3,000 and 8,000 years ago, have yielded the first ancient human genomic data from the region, where the hot and humid climate has limited the amount of ancient DNA that has survived to see modern sequencers. The results, published today (January 22) in Nature, generated several unexpected conclusions. For one, traditional hunter-gatherer people known as pygmies likely had an expansive range before the explosion of Bantu-speaking groups 3,000 years ago, and for another, modern African groups represent one of the most ancient surviving lineages, dating back to nearly a quarter of a million years ago.
Using samples taken from the inner ear bones of the ...
