Abstract
BackgroundChad Basin, lying within the bidirectional corridor of African Sahel, is one of the most populated places in Sub-Saharan Africa today. The origin of its settlement appears connected with Holocene climatic ameliorations (aquatic resources) that started ~10,000 years before present (YBP). Although both Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo language families are encountered here, the most diversified group is the Chadic branch belonging to the Afro-Asiatic language phylum. In this article, we investigate the proposed ancient migration of Chadic pastoralists from Eastern Africa based on linguistic data and test for genetic traces of this migration in extant Chadic speaking populations.ResultsWe performed whole mitochondrial genome sequencing of 16 L3f haplotypes, focused on clade L3f3 that occurs almost exclusively in Chadic speaking people living in the Chad Basin. These data supported the reconstruction of a L3f phylogenetic tree and calculation of times to the most recent common ancestor for all internal clades. A date ~8,000 YBP was estimated for the L3f3 sub-haplogroup, which is in good agreement with the supposed migration of Chadic speaking pastoralists and their linguistic differentiation from other Afro-Asiatic groups of East Africa. As a whole, the Afro-Asiatic language family presents low population structure, as 92.4% of mtDNA variation is found within populations and only 3.4% of variation can be attributed to diversity among language branches. The Chadic speaking populations form a relatively homogenous cluster, exhibiting lower diversification than the other Afro-Asiatic branches (Berber, Semitic and Cushitic).ConclusionThe results of our study support an East African origin of mitochondrial L3f3 clade that is present almost exclusively within Chadic speaking people living in Chad Basin. Whole genome sequence-based dates show that the ancestral haplogroup L3f must have emerged soon after the Out-of-Africa migration (around 57,100 ± 9,400 YBP), but the "Chadic" L3f3 clade has much less internal variation, suggesting an expansion during the Holocene period about 8,000 ± 2,500 YBP. This time period in the Chad Basin is known to have been particularly favourable for the expansion of pastoralists coming from northeastern Africa, as suggested by archaeological, linguistic and climatic data.
Highlights
Chad Basin, lying within the bidirectional corridor of African Sahel, is one of the most populated places in Sub-Saharan Africa today
Haplogroup L3f is defined by the coding variants 33964218-15514-15944del and the control region motif 16209–16519 with a the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) of 57,100 ± 9,400 years before present (YBP)
The most geographically widespread sub-haplogroup is L3f1, which is distributed across the African continent [3] and Arabia [32,33] and has a TMRCA of 48,600 ± 11,500 YBP
Summary
Chad Basin, lying within the bidirectional corridor of African Sahel, is one of the most populated places in Sub-Saharan Africa today. The origin of its settlement appears connected with Holocene climatic ameliorations (aquatic resources) that started ~10,000 years before present (YBP) Both Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo language families are encountered here, the most diversified group is the Chadic branch belonging to the Afro-Asiatic language phylum. Most studies of migrations within Africa have focused almost exclusively on the Bantu migration, by which Bantu languages together with some cultural innovations were distributed throughout Central, Eastern and Southern Africa from the present Cameroon-Nigerian border Genetic consequences of this gene flow have been well documented in present populations [2,3,4,5]. The Bantu language-gene spread is likely not the only dispersal to have left genetic traces in African extant populations Another important dispersal within Sub-Saharan Africa was the migration of Chadic speaking pastoralists, which has been well studied by linguists and archaeologists but not by geneticists. Within the Afro-Asiatic family, some authors relate Chadic to Cushitic, recognising a common Cushitic-Chadic node [7], but this classification remains controversial
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