ArticleNature human behaviour2024
Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- An inverse correlation between structural linguistic and human genetic diversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Pan-African model explainsbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact.Science advances · 2025Article
- Multi-level societies: different tasks at different social levels.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The genetic demographic history of the last hunter-gatherer population of the Himalayas.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- African harps as units of cultural evolution: a cladistic analysis on their morphology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Hunter-gatherer genetics research: Importance and avenues.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter-gatherers over the past 120 000 years.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- The Exceptions and the Rules in Global Musical Diversity.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
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8 authors.
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Abstract
Human evolutionary history in Central Africa reflects a deep history of population connectivity. However, Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs) currently speak languages acquired from their neighbouring farmers. Hence it remains unclear which aspects of CAHG cultural diversity results from long-term evolution preceding agriculture and which reflect borrowing from farmers. On the basis of musical instruments, foraging tools, specialized vocabulary and genome-wide data from ten CAHG populations, we reveal evidence of large-scale cultural interconnectivity among CAHGs before and after the Bantu expansion. We also show that the distribution of hunter-gatherer musical instruments correlates with the oldest genomic segments in our sample predating farming. Music-related words are widely shared between western and eastern groups and likely precede the borrowing of Bantu languages. In contrast, subsistence tools are less frequently exchanged and may result from adaptation to local ecologies. We conclude that CAHG material culture and specialized lexicon reflect a long evolutionary history in Central Africa.
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