October 08, 2015

West Eurasian admixture throughout Africa (?)

In 2012, I wrote:
It is no longer tenable to view West Eurasian back-migrations as limited events that affected only North and East Africa: their effects are clearly evident throughout Africa, having affected different populations to a different extent.
A new paper in Science seems to confirm West Eurasian admixture related to Early Neolithic farmers throughout Africa, including the Yoruba, and Mbuti. I haven't read the paper yet, but it would be a striking discovery if confirmed.

UPDATE (1/26/2016). An erratum has now appeared that rejects the claim for Eurasian admixture in all Africans which was the result of the bioinformatic error. I continue to think that there was Eurasian back-migration into Africa, but it was a long shot that this had happened in the last 4,500 years (hence the ? in the title of this entry). A time series of African DNA may show whether the null model of Sub-Saharan Africans receiving virtually no admixture from Eurasia for the entirety of the existence of H. sapiens can remain valid.

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.aad2879

Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture throughout the African continent

M. Gallego Llorente et al

Characterizing genetic diversity in Africa is a crucial step for most analyses reconstructing the evolutionary history of anatomically modern humans. However, historic migrations from Eurasia into Africa have affected many contemporary populations, confounding inferences. Here, we present a 12.5x coverage ancient genome of an Ethiopian male (‘Mota’) who lived approximately 4,500 years ago. We use this genome to demonstrate that the Eurasian backflow into Africa came from a population closely related to Early Neolithic farmers, who had colonized Europe 4,000 years earlier. The extent of this backflow was much greater than previously reported, reaching all the way to Central, West and Southern Africa, affecting even populations such as Yoruba and Mbuti, previously thought to be relatively unadmixed, who harbor 6-7% Eurasian ancestry.

Link

22 comments:

weure said...

Interesting! A part of them may be E-V22, originated 8200 years ago, just when the Neolithization of Egypt started. It spread southwarts, Southeast :88% of the Saho in Eritrea have E-V22 and Southwest: 27% of the Fulani have E-V22.

bellbeakerblogger said...

Dienekes,

Thanks for posting. It's interesting that the farmer leaf arrowheads are the most commonly found point in the desert before shifting to the barb-and-tang and hollow bases in the Middle Pastoral. I made some comments the other day ago on Maju's site about the Impresso-Cardial finds in North Africa and weirdly in Nubia.

His view is that Nubian (a daughter of Nilo-Saharan) shares some affinity with Basque, which sounds nutz! but plausible, especially in light of El Torc's being M269- or similar to V88+. It seems plausible that Nilo-Saharan is a relict ergative language family of the Green Sahara, obviously with a lot of Sub-Saharan influence.

Africa is a goldmine for DNA. I hope to see more studies in the near future.

mommy said...

Who would have thought it-a real surprise

Lank said...

Did you notice that Mota belongs to Y-DNA E1b1 and mtDNA L3?

Fiend of 9 worlds said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Marcos said...

Your 2014 and 2015 New Year's wish has now been granted ;)

eurologist said...

Nice article, but I think the authors are making a mistake by simply assuming that their ancient "Mota" specimen has no West Eurasian components from yet earlier back-migrations.

Kurti said...

Another strong argument for the Back to Africa migration of Haplogroup E?

cosasdehombres said...

According to the resume i read in the bbc, the east african populations have 20% of eurasian influx!!! So now the thesis about the "pureness" of the african race without non-black trace is dead. Evenmore, they have found circa 0,5% neandertahl in africans due to this eurasian migrations (so even the neandertahl virginity as parameter of non contact is dead). Now we see that Eurasians have less black-african mix than africans have eurasian genes. Now, they are not pure black africans anymore (of course with exceptions as pygmies, isolated groups and in the distant south regions), and this confirm the theory of the Haplogroup E not as "african" but as an eurasian reflux in Africa!!
The academic narrative is in silence, the theory of a pure African origin, with no people back to Africa until historical times, with blacks as the root-non-mixed people with "more diversity", without denisovan / neandertahl traces (so, "pure humans" and not like europeans that "mixed with monkeys" as black supremacists say) must change. The eurasian farmers emerge as a real genetic/racial force in the map, being not europeans, semites, africans, but conforming all of them.

George said...

See the FREE supplemental info at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2015/10/07/science.aad2879.DC1/Gallego-Llorente.SM.pdf

Mota's 'Macro Level' Y-DNA Hg is E1b1-P2.

Has anyone knowledge of his 'Terminal Level Y-DNA Haplogroup' or have thoughts on additional Y-SNPs to define his Terminal Y-DNA Hg?

See: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016073

Mark Moore (Moderator) said...

Does it speak of the "Basal Eurasian" component of this backflow? Is it just EEF or what we see in Europe- EEF and Basal Eurasian?

sykes.1 said...

So much for independent discovery of agriculture in Africa.

capra internetensis said...

Christ, Dienekes, the content to noise ratio in your comments has never been golden but it's been getting even worse late. *Grogard* is the voice of reason?

Yes, obviously finding a guy with *less* Eurasian affinity than any modern African, carrying haplogroup E, is evidence that haplogroup E is Eurasian! WTF, guys. This doesn't tell us anything about the origin of E one way or the other, except that it didn't all arrive with Neolithic farmers (no shit). As Eurologist says, obviously using Mota as a baseline won't reveal any older Eurasian ancestry that Mota already had.

We already knew that Fertile Crescent crops and livestock were introduced from the West Asia (again, no shit). How the hell is Mota supposed to tell us whether native African crops are primary or secondary domesticates?

We have known for a long time that Eurasian ancestry was widespread in Africa and very important in East Africa. Uniparental markers like mtDNA M1 and U6 and Y DNA J and R1b-V88 (among others) are clearly Eurasian, never mind the autosomes. We have known for a year or two that even the seemingly unadmixed Africans (like San and Yoruba) have minor West Eurasian ancestry. This finding (if it is accurate) means that there was rather more than expected, and even Mbuti and Dinka have it.

EEF has Basal Eurasian - the other component is "Unknown Hunter-Gatherer", which is related to WHG but not the same. We have no way to precisely identify Basal Eurasian ancestry (we can't even be certain it exists). We know the admixture can't have been purely Basal Eurasian, because modern Africans are significantly closer to WHG than Mota is. It probably does have Basal Eurasian, because it is closest to EEF.

Arolisson said...

Sykes.1, in
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6257/149.full
You will see that farming had already been established in Africa at the time of the influx of EEF-type farmers:

"Farming had already been established in Africa by this time, but the newcomers likely had some advantage that explains why their genes spread. “It must have been lots of people coming in or maybe they had new crops that were very successful,” Manica says."

Nick T said...

"So much for independent discovery of agriculture in Africa."

This has nothing to do with the discovery of agriculture in Africa, which happens long before 1500-1000 BC (the estimated date of this supposed population movement bringing new crops with it).

Anonymous said...

@ Kurti

Except that Mota belongs to Y-DNA E1b1 and mtDNA.

@ sykes.1

Rather than wide-spread and uniform Eurasian admixture across Africa (from the Yoruba to the Mbuti to the Dinka to the San), I am more inclined to believe that Mota possess some minor archaic African admixture, hence the strange results.

Anonymous said...

"The extent of this backflow was much greater than previously reported, reaching all the way to Central, West and Southern Africa, affecting even populations such as Yoruba and Mbuti, previously thought to be relatively unadmixed, who harbor 6-7% Eurasian ancestry."

Since the Bantu migration apparently spreaded to west and southern Africa from Central Africa, I can't see anything strange in this, only a logical result.
Interestingly, this migration was likely triggered by the apparition of agriculture, if I remember correctly an hypothesis, which appeared in central Africa near where is found the Chadic speakers (afro-asiatic) carriers of R1b-V88 (an haplogroup which is known to have spread a bit within the extent of Bantu migration)...

Maybe a coincidence, but it's also interesting to note that Shango, the thunder god of the Yoruba (a people leaving near the supposed starting point of the Bantu migration), that is supposed to be the deification of an ancient Yoruba king, has the attributes of the IE/semitic Thunder god deity, even the colors red, white (and indirectly black) also associated with the ancient IE traditions.

Fiend of 9 worlds said...
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Anonymous said...

@grognard

"Let me make clear. If E originates in africa then it is extremely odd that no L3 mtdna accompanies the european version of e1b, and even odder that its brother clade D is in south asia. For this to be plausible this would have to be a much older clade. So really there is not even any question of a 'back migration' for E clades, it pretty much has to be that way."

I don't see any major problems. You don't seem to understand how all of this seem to work.
How many East Asian (female) mtDNA lineages in Finland? How many (male) Y-DNA N1 lineage? Right.


"As for eurasian intrusion to africa, again it already has to be that way. R1b africa version would seemingly have to be present in africa at least ten thousand years for any of the results we see in eurasia for ancient DNA to make any sense."

I totally disagree. Actually I don't even understand what you're saying.


"For example if europe got colonized by the levant and that is where K mtdna in europe comes from, how can there be no L3 mtdna in europe?"

Erm... Not only L3 is found in Europe but also some L1 and L2.
An example among other sources:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18398433

"To elucidate the origin of African-specific mtDNA lineages, revealed previously in Slavonic populations (at frequency of about 0.4%), we completely sequenced eight African genomes belonging to haplogroups L1b, L2a, L3b, L3d and M1 gathered from Russians, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles. Results of phylogeographic analysis suggest that at least part of the African mtDNA lineages found in Slavs (such as L1b, L3b1, L3d) appears to be of West African origin, testifying to an opportunity of their occurrence as a result of migrations to Eastern Europe through Iberia. However, a prehistoric introgression of African mtDNA lineages into Eastern Europe (approximately 10 000 years ago) seems to be probable only for European-specific subclade L2a1a, defined by coding region mutations at positions 6722 and 12903 and detected in Czechs and Slovaks. Further studies of the nature of African admixture in gene pools of Europeans require the essential enlargement of databases of African complete mitochondrial genomes."

Anonymous said...

@ Grognard:
"As for eurasian intrusion to africa, again it already has to be that way. R1b africa version would seemingly have to be present in africa at least ten thousand years for any of the results we see in eurasia for ancient DNA to make any sense."

Can you tell more? I don't see what you mean. Spontaneously I can't agree with that.

"For example if europe got colonized by the levant and that is where K mtdna in europe comes from, how can there be no L3 mtdna in europe?" , "it is extremely odd that no L3 mtdna accompanies the european version of e1b"

1/ Not only there is mtDNA L3 in Europe but also some L1 and L2.
Here's an example among others:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18398433

"To elucidate the origin of African-specific mtDNA lineages, revealed previously in Slavonic populations (at frequency of about 0.4%), we completely sequenced eight African genomes belonging to haplogroups L1b, L2a, L3b, L3d and M1 gathered from Russians, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles. Results of phylogeographic analysis suggest that at least part of the African mtDNA lineages found in Slavs (such as L1b, L3b1, L3d) appears to be of West African origin, testifying to an opportunity of their occurrence as a result of migrations to Eastern Europe through Iberia. However, a prehistoric introgression of African mtDNA lineages into Eastern Europe (approximately 10 000 years ago) seems to be probable only for European-specific subclade L2a1a, defined by coding region mutations at positions 6722 and 12903 and detected in Czechs and Slovaks. Further studies of the nature of African admixture in gene pools of Europeans require the essential enlargement of databases of African complete mitochondrial genomes."


2/ The discrepancies between male haplogroups and female haplogroups in the migration process is not exactly a new concept. In Finland, the male Y-DNA N1 (an originally esat Asian haplogroup) is about 60% of the male population while the female east Asian mtDNA haplogroup are about 5% of the female population (and IIRC the east Asian element in the autosomal profile is barely 10%). R1a1a is originally coming for ONE man, and yet you found its subclades in both Europe and south Asia with totally different female haplogroups. The migration dynamics have a different effect on the spreading of the male and female haplogroups.

Fiend of 9 worlds said...
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NeilB said...

Dear Dienekes, sorry to be the bearer of troubling news but Andrea Manica in an interview for BBC Radio 4's Inside Science program has retracted one of the paper's key findings. Errors in data processing apparently led to the entirely mistaken assertion that Middle Eastern farmers migrated back into Africa and contributed their DNA to living Africans.
NeilB