ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2012
Bringing together linguistic and genetic evidence to test the Bantu expansion.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers.
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Who cites it
56 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Wide-scale geographical analysis of genetic ancestry in the South African Coloured population.BMC biology · 2025Article
- BaTwa populations from Zambia retain ancestry of past hunter-gatherer groups.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Large-scale lexical and genetic alignment supports a hybrid model of Han Chinese demic and cultural diffusions.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Association between telomere length and Plasmodium falciparum malaria endemicity in sub-Saharan Africans.American journal of human genetics · 2024Article
- Article
- Whole genomes from Angola and Mozambique inform about the origins and dispersals of major African migrations.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Genome-wide variation in the Angolan Namib Desert reveals unique pre-Bantu ancestry.Science advances · 2023Article
- Interpreting mismatches between linguistic and genetic patterns among speakers of Tanimuka (Eastern Tukanoan) and Yukuna (Arawakan).Interface focus · 2023Article
- Genomic perspectives on human dispersals during the Holocene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Genetic structure correlates with ethnolinguistic diversity in eastern and southern Africa.American journal of human genetics · 2022Article
- Phylogeography of Sub-Saharan Mitochondrial Lineages Outside Africa Highlights the Roles of the Holocene Climate Changes and the Atlantic Slave Trade.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Phylogeographic analysis of the Bantu language expansion supports a rainforest route.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Genomic analysis reveals geography rather than culture as the predominant factor shaping genetic variation in northern Kenyan human populations.American journal of biological anthropology · 2022Article
- A genomic perspective on South American human history.Genetics and molecular biology · 2022Article
- The vocal tract as a time machine: inferences about past speech and language from the anatomy of the speech organs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Bantu-speaker migration and admixture in southern Africa.Human molecular genetics · 2021Review
- Population collapse in Congo rainforest from 400 CE urges reassessment of the Bantu Expansion.Science advances · 2021Article
- Can Bayesian phylogeography reconstruct migrations and expansions in linguistic evolution?Royal Society open science · 2021Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The expansion of Bantu languages represents one of the most momentous events in the history of Africa. While it is well accepted that Bantu languages spread from their homeland (Cameroon/Nigeria) approximately 5000 years ago (ya), there is no consensus about the timing and geographical routes underlying this expansion. Two main models of Bantu expansion have been suggested: The 'early-split' model claims that the most recent ancestor of Eastern languages expanded north of the rainforest towards the Great Lakes region approximately 4000 ya, while the 'late-split' model proposes that Eastern languages diversified from Western languages south of the rainforest approximately 2000 ya. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the language dispersal was coupled with the movement of people, raising the question of language shift versus demic diffusion. We use a novel approach taking into account both the spatial and temporal predictions of the two models and formally test these predictions with linguistic and genetic data. Our results show evidence for a demic diffusion in the genetic data, which is confirmed by the correlations between genetic and linguistic distances. While there is little support for the early-split model, the late-split model shows a relatively good fit to the data. Our analyses demonstrate that subsequent contact among languages/populations strongly affected the signal of the initial migration via isolation by distance.
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