A vanished hunter gatherer people (8,500 years ago)
(originally posted 7/21/2020 on Facebook)
Today’s 10,000 year old place I studied was Mount Hora in Malawi in Africa. This was where the oldest human remains in Africa which have been DNA sequenced were found. This individual was a hunter gatherer woman who lived 8,500 years ago. Even older human bones were found here from 9,300 years ago, but they were charred and no dna extraction is likely. The woman’s people lived around the area until at least 2,500 years ago. It’s then a mystery what became of them. Iron Age agriculturalists and pastoralists swept through the area soon afterwards. Normally, they would intermix with the local hunter gatherers in the area. For example, the people living in northern europe (where most my recent ancestors came from) were also hunter gatherers 8,000 years ago. Farmers from Turkey made their way into these areas and mixed with them, and later Yamnaya pastoralists from the Russian and Ukrainian Steppes did the same, so I would have ancestry from all three of these groups. However, the modern people of Malawi have no detectible genetic ties with the hunter gatherers who lived there 8,000 years ago. Were they “pushed off” the land? All killed in a genocide? Perished or moved due to disease or environmental catastrophe right before the arrival of the newcomers? The locals of Malawi have an oral tradition about the people who were living in the lands before they arrived. They said they were “little people” (like Pygmies) and that they were ultimately all wiped out in an epic battle that took place only 200 years ago. Are these oral histories accurate? Were they referring to the hunter gatherers who had lived here for thousands of years, or maybe another group that came there later? It would be interesting for more genetic studies to take place that might help answer these questions.
Sources:
News stories -
Oldest Subhara DNA (Sep 2017)
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-ancient-human-dna-sub-saharan-africa.html
https://www.futurity.org/oldest-dna-malawi-africa-1558842-2/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/science-environment-41348087
Student field work (Apr 2018)
http://news.emory.edu/features/2018/04/anthropology-malawi/index.html
Genome Study (Jun 2019)
https://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards.com/thread/2994/mt-hora-malawi-6200-bce
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