Evolutionary History and Adaptation from High-Coverage Whole-Genome Sequences of Diverse African Hunter-Gatherers
“ Hunting and gathering was humanity’s first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Until 12,000 years ago, all humans lived this way. ” [The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly, 1999] Despite of playing a central role in human evolution, African populations remain one of the most understudied groups in human genomics. Furthermore, African human populations preserve the most genetic diversity in the world, and the study of this genetic diversity among the multitude of diverse African ethnic groups is crucial for reconstructing modern human origins. The succession of African hunter-gatherer societies is the longest and one of the most varied known, and African hunter-gatherer populations have some of the deepest divergence time of our species. In this work the genomes of 15 African hunter-gatherers were sequenced at high coverage, expanding the catalog of human genetic variation and increasing the few number of high coverage African genomes that have been analyzed to date. Samples and population features The 15 sequenced genomes were of male individuals coming from three different hunter-gatherer populations: 5 Pygmies from Cameroon, 5 Hadza and 5 Sandawe from Tanzania (Fig. 1). The Hadza and Sandawe …
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