ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Genetic variation reveals large-scale population expansion and migration during the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers.
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Who cites it
50 citing papers in PubMed, 248 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trial
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- The Diverse Genetic Landscape of Hearing Impairment in South African Families.Clinical genetics · 2025Article
- 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
- Early agriculture and crop transitions at Kakapel Rockshelter in the Lake Victoria region of eastern Africa.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
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- Evolutionary Genetics and Admixture in African Populations.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Review
- Genetic structure correlates with ethnolinguistic diversity in eastern and southern Africa.American journal of human genetics · 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
- A geometric relationship ofPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Male-biased migration from East Africa introduced pastoralism into southern Africa.BMC biology · 2021Article
- The evolution of human skin pigmentation involved the interactions of genetic, environmental, and cultural variables.Pigment cell & melanoma research · 2021Review
- Bantu-speaker migration and admixture in southern Africa.Human molecular genetics · 2021Review
- Human OMICs and Computational Biology Research in Africa: Current Challenges and Prospects.Omics : a journal of integrative biology · 2021Article
- Population collapse in Congo rainforest from 400 CE urges reassessment of the Bantu Expansion.Science advances · 2021Article
- Radiation with reticulation marks the origin of a major malaria vector.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The majority of sub-Saharan Africans today speak a number of closely related languages collectively referred to as 'Bantu' languages. The current distribution of Bantu-speaking populations has been found to largely be a consequence of the movement of people rather than a diffusion of language alone. Linguistic and single marker genetic studies have generated various hypotheses regarding the timing and the routes of the Bantu expansion, but these hypotheses have not been thoroughly investigated. In this study, we re-analysed microsatellite markers typed for large number of African populations that-owing to their fast mutation rates-capture signatures of recent population history. We confirm the spread of west African people across most of sub-Saharan Africa and estimated the expansion of Bantu-speaking groups, using a Bayesian approach, to around 5600 years ago. We tested four different divergence models for Bantu-speaking populations with a distribution comprising three geographical regions in Africa. We found that the most likely model for the movement of the eastern branch of Bantu-speakers involves migration of Bantu-speaking groups to the east followed by migration to the south. This model, however, is only marginally more likely than other models, which might indicate direct movement from the west and/or significant gene flow with the western Branch of Bantu-speakers. Our study use multi-loci genetic data to explicitly investigate the timing and mode of the Bantu expansion and it demonstrates that west African groups rapidly expanded both in numbers and over a large geographical area, affirming the fact that the Bantu expansion was one of the most dramatic demographic events in human history.
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