Dispersals and genetic adaptation of Bantu-speaking populations in Africa and North America

Abstract

Bantu languages are spoken by about 310 million Africans, yet the genetic history of Bantu-speaking populations remains largely unexplored. We generated genomic data for 1318 individuals from 35 populations in western central Africa, where Bantu languages originated. We found that early Bantu speakers first moved southward, through the equatorial rainforest, before spreading toward eastern and southern Africa. We also found that genetic adaptation of Bantu speakers was facilitated by admixture with local populations, particularly for the and loci. Finally, we identified a major contribution of western central African Bantu speakers to the ancestry of African Americans, whose genomes present no strong signals of natural selection. Together, these results highlight the contribution of Bantu-speaking peoples to the complex genetic history of Africans and African Americans.

Genetic history of the African Sahelian populations

“…This pattern of acquisition of non-autochthonous selected alleles by admixture was further confirmed in Bantu groups, in the south of the African continent. 79 These authors confirmed the Near Eeastern-selected RAB3GAP1/ LCT/MCM6 region in the east Bantu groups, in complement to our east Sahel populations, proving the importance of a specific phenotype related to the metabolism of lipids across such an extended strip along the east African coast.…”

Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure

“…Today, some of the earliest branching African lineages are present only in populations with relatively small census sizes, including the southern African Khoe-San (see STAR Methods for terminology), central African rainforest hunter-gatherers, and Hadza of Tanzania (Gronau et al, 2011; Schlebusch et al, 2012; Veeramah et al, 2012). However, the population structure of Africa prior to the expansion of food producers (pastoralists and agriculturalists) remains unknown (Busby et al, 2016; Gurdasani et al, 2015; Patin et al, 2017). Bantu-speaking agriculturalists originating in western Africa are thought to have brought farming to eastern Africa by ~2000 years calBP (calibrated radiocarbon years Before Present, defined by convention as years before 1950 CE) and to southern Africa by ~1500 BP, thereby spreading the largest single ancestry component to African genomes today (Russell et al, 2014; Tishkoff et al, 2009).…”

Unraveling African diversity from a cross‐disciplinary perspective

“…The Bantu expansion is the most important linguistic, cultural, and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa . It started in west‐central Africa 5,000–3,000 years ago, and evolutionary genetics demonstrated that mass human migration was the main underlying force of this expansion . New cross‐disciplinary research projects will elucidate long‐distant spread of farming practices and the interaction of migrating farmers with autochthonous groups, to shed additional light of when, where, and how early Bantu‐speaking populations settled in wider regions from central, eastern, and southern Africa …”

“…On both sides of the African continent, recent mass migrations contributed to one of the humanity's darkest chapters, the slave trade. Along the west African coast, the transatlantic slave trade impacted the demographic history of numerous populations, for example, the population history of Cape Verdean Kriolu speakers . The Indian Ocean slave trade network, along the east African coast, mainly impacted African islands from southeastern Africa, for example, the genetic landscape of the Malagasy population …”

“…20 It started in westcentral Africa 5,000-3,000 years ago, and evolutionary genetics demonstrated that mass human migration was the main underlying force of this expansion. 21,22 New cross-disciplinary research projects 23 On both sides of the African continent, recent mass migrations contributed to one of the humanity's darkest chapters, the slave trade.…”