A 4,500-Year-Old Ethiopian Skull Genome Indicates Massive Eurasian Migration

Some DNA from a 4,500-year-old Ethiopian skull tells us that a West Eurasian shift was effected about 3,000 years ago.

The migration to the Horn of Africa impacted the genetics of those who are living there today, according to HNGN.

Hence, the first human genome from Africa was "sequenced". Research also shows that there was a wave of migration back into Africa that was twice as genetically significant as had been believed, said the University of Cambridge .

The study was published in a recent edition of the journal Science.

The DNA was removed from the skull of a man who had been interred with his face down 4,500 years ago in a cave that could preserve the genetic material in a way that had never been seen before in this time and period.

"The bones predate the "Eurasian backflow" event from regions of Western Eurasia such as the Near East and Anatolia back to the Horn of Africa. The findings linked these Western Eurasians to the Early Neolithic farmers that are believed to have brought agriculture to Europe 4,000 years earlier," according to HNGN.

Undertaking a comparison of the ancient genome with modern Africans helps the scientists to determine that East African populations have about 25 percent Eurasian ancestry from this huge migration. From all over the continent, African populations seemed to "share at least 5 percent of these genetics".

"Roughly speaking, the wave of West Eurasian migration back into the Horn of Africa could have been as much as 30 [percent] of the population that already lived there - and that, to me, is mind-blowing. The question is: what got them moving all of a sudden?" said Andrea Manica, senior author of the study from the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology.

It is not known why the migration took place, yet the researchers felt that it coincided with Near Eastern crops into East Africa, such as wheat and barley, indicating that the migrants revolutionized agriculture here.

"The sequencing of ancient genomes is still so new, and it's changing the way we reconstruct human origins," Manica said. "These new techniques will keep evolving, enabling us to gain an ever-clearer understanding of who our earliest ancestors were."