Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Institute of Legal Medicine, Catholic University, Rome, Italy.
Mol Biol Evol. 2015 Jan;32(1):29-43. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msu263. Epub 2014 Sep 14.
A consensus on Bantu-speaking populations being genetically similar has emerged in the last few years, but the demographic scenarios associated with their dispersal are still a matter of debate. The frontier model proposed by archeologists postulates different degrees of interaction among incoming agropastoralist and resident foraging groups in the presence of "static" and "moving" frontiers. By combining mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome data collected from several southern African populations, we show that Bantu-speaking populations from regions characterized by a moving frontier developing after a long-term static frontier have larger hunter-gatherer contributions than groups from areas where a static frontier was not followed by further spatial expansion. Differences in the female and male components suggest that the process of assimilation of the long-term resident groups into agropastoralist societies was gender biased. Our results show that the diffusion of Bantu languages and culture in Southern Africa was a process more complex than previously described and suggest that the admixture dynamics between farmers and foragers played an important role in shaping the current patterns of genetic diversity.
在过去的几年中，班图语人群在基因上相似的观点已经达成共识，但与他们的扩散相关的人口情景仍然存在争议。考古学家提出的前沿模型假设，在“静态”和“移动”边界的存在下，传入的农牧民和当地狩猎采集群体之间存在不同程度的相互作用。通过结合从几个南部非洲人群中收集的线粒体 DNA 和 Y 染色体数据，我们表明，与来自没有进一步空间扩张的静态边界地区的群体相比，在长期静态边界之后发展的移动边界地区的讲班图语人群具有更大的狩猎采集者贡献。女性和男性成分的差异表明，将长期居住的群体融入农牧社会的同化过程存在性别偏见。我们的结果表明，班图语语言和文化在南部非洲的扩散比以前描述的更为复杂，这表明农民和采集者之间的混合动态在塑造当前遗传多样性模式方面发挥了重要作用。
