East and Southern African Neolithic: Geography and Overview

Phylogeographic Refinement and Large Scale Genotyping of Human Y Chromosome Haplogroup E Provide New Insights into the Dispersal of Early Pastoralists in the African Continent

“…We propose that the migration marked by the E-M293 haplogroup could be the final step of a north-to-south range expansion linked to different branches of E-V1515, which initially involved people from Eritrea (and possibly northern Sudan, not sampled here). This migratory route is concordant in time and space with archeological evidence for early domestication of African cattle in northeastern Africa about 10 ka, southward climate-driven movements of herders into southern Ethiopian highlands and Turkana basin (northern Kenya) around 4 ka, and a subsequent subequatorial pastoralist expansion toward southern Kenya/Tanzania and southern Africa not before 3 ka ( Ehret 2002 ; Marshall and Hildebrand 2002 ; Lesur et al 2014 ; Wright 2014 ). Within haplogroup E-V1515, we also remarked a striking parallelism in the geographic distribution of the MSY sister clades E-V1486 and E-V1700 ( fig.…”

Humans as Agents in the Termination of the African Humid Period

“…Correlation does not demonstrate causation, and it is possible that domesticated animal economies moved into shrub-transitioning environments in response to ecological shifts rather than causing such shifts. Indeed, this is the orthodox view of the relationship between climate changes and the spread of the Neolithic throughout subSaharan Africa (Smith, 1992;Marshall and Hildebrand, 2002;Kuper and Kröpelin, 2006;Ozainne, 2014;Wright, 2014;Gatto and Zerboni, 2015).…”