Friday, February 26, 2010

Their names were !Gubi, G/aq'o, D#kgao and !Ai and they spoke Tuu, Ju/'hoansi and !Kung

The research was conducted by a team headed by Schuster and geneticist Vanessa M. Hayes of Children's Cancer Institute Australia in Sydney. They completely sequenced the genomes of one Bushman and one Bantu and sequenced the protein coding regions of three other Bushmen.

The Bantu was Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who served as a surrogate for the agricultural peoples who account for about 80% of southern Africa's population. The four Bushmen, also known as Khoisan or San, were the heads of their tribes living in the Kalahari Desert. Their names were !Gubi, G/aq'o, D#kgao and !Ai and they spoke Tuu, Ju/'hoansi and !Kung. (The unusual characters denote clicking sounds in the languages.) One immediate surprise to emerge from the research, at least for Tutu, was that one woman in his lineage was of Bushman origin. It is not clear, however, how many generations back that woman lived.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

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