Researchers successfully discovered one of the most ancient lineages in history through genome sequencing techniques.
The findings mark the first time a population has been analyzed and matched to climate conditions that have taken place over the past 200,000 years, Nanyang Technological University reported.
To make their findings the researchers sequenced the genomes of five living individuals from the Southern African Khoisan hunter-gatherer tribe and compared them with 420,000 genetic variants across 1,462 genomes from 48 ethnic groups across the world. The team concluded the group was genetically distinct from Europeans, Asiansand other Africans.
These findings suggest the Khoisan population's ancestors did not interbreed with other groups for the past ethnic groups for the last 150,000 years and the tribe was the majority of living humans until around 20,000 years ago.
"Khoisan [hunter-gatherers] in Southern Africa have always perceived themselves as the oldest people," said Professor Stephan Christoph Schuster, an NTU scientist at the Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) and a former Penn State University professor. "Our study proves that they truly belong to one of mankind's most ancient lineages, and these high quality genome sequences obtained from the tribesmen will help us better understand human population history, especially the understudied branch of mankind such as the Khoisan."
In the current Khoisan culture, marriage is contained within the group; if a female marries a non-Khoisan man she is ejected from the exclusive population.
"A key finding from this study is that even today after 150,000 years, single non-admixed individuals or descendants of those who did not interbreed with separate populations can be identified within the Ju/'hoansi population, which means there might be more of such unique individuals in other parts of the world," said Hie Lim Kim, a SCELSE senior research fellow.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature Communications.
