Color Categories in Language Contact: ‘Pygmy’ Hunter-Gatherers and Bantu Farmers

Maternal traces of deep common ancestry and asymmetric gene flow between Pygmy hunter-gatherers and Bantu-speaking farmers.

Two groups of populations with completely different lifestyles-the Pygmy hunter-gatherers and the Bantu-speaking farmers-coexist in Central Africa. We investigated the origins of these two groups and the interactions between them, by analyzing mtDNA variation in 1,404 individuals from 20 farming populations and 9 Pygmy populations from Central Africa, with the aim of shedding light on one of th...

The epigenomic landscape of African rainforest hunter-gatherers and farmers.

The genetic history of African populations is increasingly well documented, yet their patterns of epigenomic variation remain uncharacterized. Moreover, the relative impacts of DNA sequence variation and temporal changes in lifestyle and habitat on the human epigenome remain unknown. Here we generate genome-wide genotype and DNA methylation profiles for 362 rainforest hunter-gatherers and seden...

Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter–Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming involved a major cultural innovation that has spread rapidly over most of the globe in the last ten millennia. In sub-Saharan Africa, hunter-gatherers have begun to shift toward an agriculture-based lifestyle over the last 5,000 years. Only a few populations still base their mode of subsistence on hunting and gathering. The Pygmies are consid...

Horticulturalists and Hunter-Gatherers

Adaptive, convergent origins of the pygmy phenotype in African rainforest hunter-gatherers.

The evolutionary history of the human pygmy phenotype (small body size), a characteristic of African and Southeast Asian rainforest hunter-gatherers, is largely unknown. Here we use a genome-wide admixture mapping analysis to identify 16 genomic regions that are significantly associated with the pygmy phenotype in the Batwa, a rainforest hunter-gatherer population from Uganda (east central Afri...