ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Population interconnectivity over the past 120,000 years explains distribution and diversity of Central African hunter-gatherers.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pan-African model explainsbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Malaria shaped human spatial organization for the past 74 thousand years.Science advances · 2026Article
- A high-coverage Neandertal genome from the Altai Mountains reveals population structure among Neandertals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Archaic humans in the Middle Palaeolithic Levant conducted planned and selective intercepts of aurochs, but not mass hunting.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Ochre communities of practice in Stone Age Eswatini.Nature communications · 2024Article
- BaTwa populations from Zambia retain ancestry of past hunter-gatherer groups.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Musical instruments, tools, language and genetic data reveal ancient hunter-gatherer networks.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Environmental conditions associated with initial northern expansion of anatomically modern humans.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Orangutan males make increased use of social learning opportunities, when resource availability is high.iScience · 2024Article
- Hunter-gatherer genetics research: Importance and avenues.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- A quantitative analysis of Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic cultural taxonomy and evolution in Europe.PloS one · 2024Article
- Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter-gatherers over the past 120 000 years.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
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Abstract
The evolutionary history of African hunter-gatherers holds key insights into modern human diversity. Here, we combine ethnographic and genetic data on Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHG) to show that their current distribution and density are explained by ecology rather than by a displacement to marginal habitats due to recent farming expansions, as commonly assumed. We also estimate the range of hunter-gatherer presence across Central Africa over the past 120,000 years using paleoclimatic reconstructions, which were statistically validated by our newly compiled dataset of dated archaeological sites. Finally, we show that genomic estimates of divergence times between CAHG groups match our ecological estimates of periods favoring population splits, and that recoveries of connectivity would have facilitated subsequent gene flow. Our results reveal that CAHG stem from a deep history of partially connected populations. This form of sociality allowed the coexistence of relatively large effective population sizes and local differentiation, with important implications for the evolution of genetic and cultural diversity in Homo sapiens.
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