ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2013
Cultural phylogeography of the Bantu Languages of sub-Saharan Africa.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Insights into human history and complex traits from the genomes of African populations.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Review
- A dataset of scientific dates from archaeological sites in eastern Africa spanning 5000 BCE to 1800 CE.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Operationalizing language-based population stratification for widening access to precision genomics in Africa.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Inferring language dispersal patterns with velocity field estimation.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Language endangerment: Using analytical methods from conservation biology to illuminate loss of linguistic diversity.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2023Review
- Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
- Same-sex competition and sexual conflict expressed through witchcraft accusations.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Testing methods of linguistic homeland detection using synthetic data.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Population collapse in Congo rainforest from 400 CE urges reassessment of the Bantu Expansion.Science advances · 2021Article
- Along the Indian Ocean Coast: Genomic Variation in Mozambique Provides New Insights into the Bantu Expansion.Molecular biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Article
- Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Genome-wide data from the Bubi of Bioko Island clarifies the Atlantic fringe of the Bantu dispersal.BMC genomics · 2019Article
- Assessing the importance of cultural diffusion in the Bantu spread into southeastern Africa.PloS one · 2019Article
- Whole-Exome Sequencing Reveals Uncaptured Variation and Distinct Ancestry in the Southern African Population of Botswana.American journal of human genetics · 2018Article
- Deep cultural ancestry and human development indicators across nation states.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- Population Size and the Rate of Language Evolution: A Test Across Indo-European, Austronesian, and Bantu Languages.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
There is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking Bantu languages as they expanded to cover much of sub-Saharan Africa. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of Bantu languages and map them onto geographical space in order to assess the likely pathway of expansion and test between dispersal scenarios. The results clearly support a scenario in which groups first moved south through the rainforest from a homeland somewhere near the Nigeria-Cameroon border. Emerging on the south side of the rainforest, one branch moved south and west. Another branch moved towards the Great Lakes, eventually giving rise to the monophyletic clade of East Bantu languages that inhabit East and Southeastern Africa. These phylogenies also reveal information about more general processes involved in the diversification of human populations into distinct ethnolinguistic groups. Our study reveals that Bantu languages show a latitudinal gradient in covering greater areas with increasing distance from the equator. Analyses suggest that this pattern reflects a true ecological relationship rather than merely being an artefact of shared history. The study shows how a phylogeographic approach can address questions relating to the specific histories of certain groups, as well as general cultural evolutionary processes.
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