The inimitable Joe Pickrell has dropped his Khoisan-are-part-Italian preprint onto arXiv, Ancient west Eurasian ancestry in southern and eastern Africa. I’m being glib in my characterization of the paper’s core conclusion, but there’s a reason for such a flip response: the inferences that he seems to draw from the genetic data strike me as verging on crazy. But that’s OK, what genetics is telling us is that history was a whole lot crazier than we had imagined.
Let’s back up for a moment here. For several decades now geneticists have assumed that the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Khoisan-qua-Khoisan, Africa’s last hunter-gatherers who retain their ancestral language along with the Hadza, are the ur-humans. The basal lineage that first diverged from the rest of mankind at the cusp of the Out of Africa event. This is evident in Y chromosomal and mtDNA phylogenies, where the Bushmen and their kin harbor variants which coalesce deeply in time with those of others. And, a few years ago another group revealed the likelihood that Bushmen also are products of an admixture event in the last ~50,000 years with a distinct hominin lineage which diverged ~1 million years before the present from the main line which led up to anatomically modern humanity. Now Pickrell et al. present us with a twist which is perhaps even more astringent than a lime: in their genomes the Bushmen and their Khoisan kin, the Khoe herders, reflect an ancient admixture event with East Africans, who themselves were the outcomes of hybridizations between West Eurasians and indigenous African populations. More relevantly for my concise summation of the conclusion, the West Eurasian component does not necessarily reflect modern Middle Eastern populations, so much as Southern Europeans!