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Modern North Africans' recent origin is outside Africa
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Troll Patrol # Ish Gebor: [QB] 05.03.2012 North Africa is an especially interesting region for human population geneticists due to its strategic geographical situation between Europe, the Middle-East and the rest of Africa. It is a partially isolated geographical area due to the presence of the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert, which have conditioned human migrations. [IMG]http://www.upf.edu/enoticies/1112/_img/nordafricans.jpg[/IMG] As a consequence, a complex scenario has been established in terms of the genetic structure of these populations, which is a combinations of their isolation and the numerous migratory movements of various origins throughout history. The most recent migrations have been documented, but the most ancient have been inferred from archaeological remains and the genetic features of some North African Populations. An exhaustive genetic study of North Africa's human populations was published in PLoS Genetics on January 13 th, and was undertaken jointly by researchers in the Evolutionary Biology Institute (CSIC-UPF) and Stanford University, among other institutions. The study reveals that the genetic composition of North Africa's human populations is extremely complex, and the result of a local component dating back thirteen thousand years and the varied genetic influence of neighbouring populations on North African groups during successive migrations. [b]According to David Comas[/b], coordinator of the study and researcher at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), "some of the questions we wanted to answer were whether today's inhabitants are direct descendants of the populations with the oldest archaeological remains in the region, dating back fifty thousand years, or whether they are descendants of the Neolithic populations in the Middle East which introduced agriculture to the region around eight thousand years ago. We also wondered if there had been any genetic exchange between the North African populations and the neighbouring regions and if so, when these took place. [b]A native genetic component defines North Africans[/b] To answer these questions, the researchers analyzed around 800,000 genetic markers, distributed throughout the entire genome in 125 North African individuals belonging to seven representative populations in the whole region, and the information obtained was compared with the information from the neighbouring populations. The results of this study show that there is a native genetic component which defines North Africans. In-depth study of these markers, shows that the people inhabiting North Africa today are not descendants of either the earliest occupants of this region fifty thousand years ago, or descendants of the most recent Neolithic populations. [b]The ancestors of modern North Africans returned to Africa[/b] The data shows that the ancestors of today's North Africans were a group of populations which already lived in the region around thirteen thousand years ago. Furthermore, this local North African genetic component is very different from the one found in the populations in the south of the Sahara, which shows that the ancestors of today's North Africans were members of a subgroup of humanity who left Africa to conquer the rest of the world and who subsequently returned to the north of the continent to settle in the region. [IMG]http://www.upf.edu/enoticies/1112/_img/nordafricans2.jpg[/IMG] [b]The migratory imprint has been also found[/b] As well as this local component, North African populations were also observed to share genetic markers with all the neighbouring regions, as a result of more recent migrations, although these appear in different proportions. There is an influence from the Middle East, which becomes less marked as the distance from the Arabian Peninsula increases, similar proportions of European influence in all North African populations, and, in some populations, there are even individuals who present a large proportion of influence from the South of the Sahara in their genome. In this latter case, it was possible to delimit where this genetic exchange took place. It was a result of a recent migration, about 24-30 generations ago (750-900 years) at the height of the Great Berber Empires and the slave trade through the Sahara desert, which was established in this region during that period. Last updated 26.01.2015 © Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona https://www.upf.edu/enoticies/en/1112/0106.html David Comas http://biologiaevolutiva.org/dcomas/ [/QB][/QUOTE]
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