The peopling of the last Green Sahara revealed by high-coverage resequencing of trans-Saharan patrilineages

Autor: Eugenia D’Atanasio, Beniamino Trombetta, Maria Bonito, Andrea Finocchio, Genny Di Vito, Mara Seghizzi, Rita Romano, Gianluca Russo, Giacomo Maria Paganotti, Elizabeth Watson, Alfredo Coppa, Paolo Anagnostou, Jean-Michel Dugoujon, Pedro Moral, Daniele Sellitto, Andrea Novelletto, Fulvio Cruciani
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2018
Předmět:
Zdroj: Genome Biology, Vol 19, Iss 1, Pp 1-15 (2018)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1474-760X
DOI: 10.1186/s13059-018-1393-5
Popis: Abstract Background Little is known about the peopling of the Sahara during the Holocene climatic optimum, when the desert was replaced by a fertile environment. Results In order to investigate the role of the last Green Sahara in the peopling of Africa, we deep-sequence the whole non-repetitive portion of the Y chromosome in 104 males selected as representative of haplogroups which are currently found to the north and to the south of the Sahara. We identify 5,966 mutations, from which we extract 142 informative markers then genotyped in about 8,000 subjects from 145 African, Eurasian and African American populations. We find that the coalescence age of the trans-Saharan haplogroups dates back to the last Green Sahara, while most northern African or sub-Saharan clades expanded locally in the subsequent arid phase. Conclusions Our findings suggest that the Green Sahara promoted human movements and demographic expansions, possibly linked to the adoption of pastoralism. Comparing our results with previously reported genome-wide data, we also find evidence for a sex-biased sub-Saharan contribution to northern Africans, suggesting that historical events such as the trans-Saharan slave trade mainly contributed to the mtDNA and autosomal gene pool, whereas the northern African paternal gene pool was mainly shaped by more ancient events.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals