COMMON FEMALE ANCESTOR TEST 2

Geneticists divide African Eve's descendants into haplogroups popularly called "clans" to make
the subject easier for lay people to understand. Different types of mtDNA correspond to different
haplogroups. Currently, there are only 33 major haplogroups. Again, there have been different
maternal lines in existence in human history, but these are the only lines that can be found in
existence today.

In Africa, there is a single main lineage, known as

Haplogroup L, Clan Lara, to which “African Eve”
belonged. 76% of Africans belong to this clan (100% of
the Pygmies and 67% of the Senegalese). The age of
Haplogroup L is estimated to be 98,000 to 130,000 years.
The oldest lineage is the African L1a group. The two
subsequent ancient splits also happened inside Africa,
originating the L1b/c and L2 haplogroups with ages of
122,000–132,000 and 85,000–95,000 years before the
present respectively. These three groups still have an
overwhelming sub-Saharan African implantation. The
next branching, dated between 59,000–69,000 years ago, also occurred in Africa but comprising
groups currently found only in Africa (L3), and others with a first expansion out of Africa.

African L2 Haplogroups

Pereira et al (2001)

The Haplogroup L2 lineage has been subdivided into several subgroups. The great majority
belong to L2a, one of the most frequent and widespread mtDNA subgroup in Africa, especially
East Africa as well as in African Americans (~25%). The Mandanka in Senegal are 36% L2c
while 43% of Mozambiqans are L2a. The Cabo Verde islands (20% L2a), off the east coast of
Africa, served as a stopping point for the transatlantic slave trade. Estimated origin times range
from 120,000 years for L2d, 55,000 years for L2a and 30,000 years for L2b and L2c.

Today, L3 derivatives are present in nearly all the African populations. L3, the youngest branch,
is common in East Africa and is believed to be the source of both the Asian and European
lineages, about 80,000 years ago. L3 contains the progenitors of the Eurasian haplogroups M and
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N. L3e is the most widespread, frequent, and ancient of the African L3 clades, comprising about
one-third of all L3 types in sub-Saharan Africa. Haplogroups L3b and L3d types are
predominantly West African with a substantial representation in African Americans. L3b has
spilled over into North Africa and onto the Near East, with very little dispersal into either East
Africa or even Central Africa. L3d is mainly West African and African American.

Haplogroup L3e is the most frequent and ancient of the African L3 types and is thought to have
originated in central or eastern Africa about 46,000 years ago, and was a hitchhiker of much later
dispersal and local expansion events, with the rise of food production and iron smelting.
Enforced migration of African Slaves to the Americas translocated L3e clades, the descendents
of whom in Brazil and the Caribbean still reflect their African ancestries.

Paleolithic Africa: Culture of the Vasikela !Kung

Geneticists believe that the population of the Vasikela !Kung (L1a) of the northwestern Kalahari
desert in southern Africa is the population that lies nearest to the root of the human
mitochondrial DNA tree. Another population that is almost equally old is that of the Biaka
pygmies of Central Africa (L1b). The L2 populations of the Mbuti Pygmies (L2a) and the
Sengalese (L2c) are almost as ancient.

The hunter-gatherer lifestyles of the !Kung Bushmen may be the best

approximation today of what it was like to live in Africa at the time of
the earliest humans. The !Kung population is currently located in
isolated areas of Botswana, Angola, and Namibia. They refer to
themselves as the Zhun/twasi, "the real people”. The semi-arid region in
which they live features some trees but is mostly brush and grass-
covered low hills and flat spaces. Rainfall during the wet season varies
from only five to forty inches. Temperatures during the winter are
frequently below freezing, but during the summer are well above 100F.
The villages, consisting of 10-30 people, are semi-permanent; once the
water source dries up, the band has to carry their belongings to a new
site where a reliable source of water can be located. The huts are small
and built of grass with all doors facing the center, circling a large communal area where children
play, women cook, and all family life except for sleeping takes place. A fire is burning in front of
each hut at all times.

The !Kung are hunter gatherers, adapting to their semi-arid environment by gathering roots,
berries, fruits, and nuts that they gather from the desert, and from the meat provided by the
hunters. Both women and men possess a remarkable knowledge of the many edible foods
available, and of the medicinal and toxic properties of different species. !Kung men are
responsible for providing the meat, although women might occasionally kill small mammals.
Game is not plentiful and the hunters sometimes must travel great distances. Meat is usually
sparse and is shared fairly among the group when a hunter is successful. Every part of the animal
is used; hides are tanned for blankets and bones are cracked for the marrow. Typical game

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sought in the hunt includes wildebeest, gemsbok, and

giraffe; they also kill various reptiles and birds, and collect
honey when it is available. The men provide household
tools and maintain a supply of poison tipped arrows and
spears for hunting.

!Kung women provide the majority of the food, spending

two to three days a week foraging varying distances from
the camp, and are also responsible for child care, gathering
wood for fires, carrying water, and cooking. Typical foods
they might return with are mongongo nuts, baobab fruits,
water roots, bitter melon, or !Gwa berries. Children are left
at home to be watched over by those remaining in camp,
but nursing children are carried on these foraging trips,
adding to the load the !Kung women must carry. Leisure
time in !Kung camps is spent singing, visiting, playing
games, and storytelling. They have no formal authority
figure or chief, but govern themselves by group consensus.
Disputes are resolved through lengthy discussions where
all involved have a chance to make their thoughts heard until some agreement is reached. Travel
to visit relatives occurs during or following the rainy season, when a source of water and food is
assured during the trip. During the dry winter months, a number of bands may settle around one
permanent spring. During this time, ritual life increases, including the frequency of trance
dances.

Prehistoric Saharan Africa

At one time the Sahara was fairly moist, and it was populated from the time of human origins.
The Sahara Desert includes significant mountain ranges, such as the Tassili N'Ajjer. Before
North Africa became very dry, this was the home to fishermen, hunters and herdsmen in great
numbers, and their diffusion as the desert became inhospitable had a significant effect upon the
emergence of Ancient Kemet (Egypt), the states to the West where savannah met forest, and the
Mediterranean coast to the North. Thirty thousand rock
paintings and engravings in all mountainous areas are known,
half from Tassili in Algeria. The earliest phase is called the
Bubalus Period (~5500 – 3500 BC), and the art shows
animals that became extinct in the area, including the buffalo
(bubalus), elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus. The men
are armed with clubs, throwing sticks, axes and bows, but
never spears.

During the Cattle Period (~3500 – 1500 BC), the appearance of cattle and rams suggests the
beginning of a herding economy. The domestication of the local wild Bos africanus cattle
probably originated in the Sahara. Sheep and goats were also domesticated and spread from the

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Sahara to Cyrinaica and Khartoum ~4500BC. The economic shift to cattle herding was
accompanied by a change in settlement patterns, with settlements extending far out into the
plain, such as this site at Adrar Bouis in the Tenere desert. Evidence suggests such villages
covered a considerable large area and supported a large population, but building materials were
insubstantial and left little trace. The horse seems to have been introduced by the Sea Peoples in
about 1200 B.C., and with the horse came Cretan influence. Camel were thought to have been
introduced in about 700 B.C.

Left: Rock Art painting from the Cattle

Period shows herdsmen and cattle at
Tin Tazazarift, Tassili, ~4500 BC

Right: Camel, Tin Tazazarift, Tassili,

~700 BC

Urban settlement began at a very early date in Africa. The earliest urban settlements were stone-
walled towns in southern Mauritania that date back to sometime in the second millennium BC.
An explosion of urban settlement in the Sahel region immediately south of the Sahara began
between 600 and 200 BC. The Sahel is a hot, dry savannah that can support human agriculture
and settlement. The first urban settlements were Sahelian: Jenne, Gao, and Kumbi (later Kumbi
Saleh, the capital of the kingdom of Ghana). All of these urban centers grew up in oasis and river
regions which could support such large populations.

Migrations:
When modern humans first started to leave Africa, about
50,000 years ago by present reckoning, they probably
consisted of small groups of hunter-gatherers a few
hundred strong. In their determined exploration of the
world before them, they must have overcome, with the
primitive means at their disposal, the extreme rigors of
climate, terrain and perhaps the archaic human
populations like the fearsome Neanderthals who had
preceded them out of Africa.

African south of the Sahara lived largely in nomadic, hunter-gatherer groups up until 200 BC.
However, early sub-Saharan Africans developed metallurgy at a very early stage, possibly even
before other peoples. Around 1400 BC, East Africans began producing steel in carbon furnaces
(steel was invented in the west in the eighteenth century).

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African south of the Sahara lived largely in

nomadic, hunter-gatherer groups up until 200
BC. However, early sub-Saharan Africans
developed metallurgy at a very early stage,
possibly even before other peoples. Around
1400 BC, East Africans began producing
steel in carbon furnaces (steel was invented
in the west in the eighteenth century).

The Iron Age itself came very early to

Africa, probably around the sixth century
BC, in Ethiopia, the Great Lakes region,
Tanzania, and Nigeria. Iron technology,
however, only spread slowly across Africa; it
wasn't until the first century AD that the
smelting of iron began to rapidly spread
throughout the continent.

Bantu Migrations:
The instrument of that spread was the Bantu
migrations (dark brown arrows). Haplogroup L3 has been implicated in the Bantu expansion and
L2 contributes 36% to the southeastern Bantu population. Bantu is a family of languages that are
closely related and represent the largest linguistic family of African languages. The most recent
archaeological and linguistic evidence suggested that the Bantu migrations originated in West
Africa about 3,000 - 4,000 years ago, spreading both east and south. They migrated south into
the rain forest regions around the Congo and they migrated east into the East African highlands.
Wherever they migrated, they imposed their language, which mixed with and replaced
indigenous languages. How they managed to
impose their language on such a wide range
of people across such a huge swathe of
territory is anyone's guess. Further
migrations in the first millenium then
displaced the earlier Bantu immigrants, who
pushed farther east and south. These Bantu
immigrants would eventually found the
civilization of the Mwenumatapa, or "Great
Zimbabwe" civilization. Not only did the
Bantu spread iron-smelting techniques across Africa, they also were responsible for diffusing
agriculture, particularly agriculture of high-yield crops such as yams, bananas, and plantains.
The spread of agriculture led to the explosive growth of village life all throughout Africa.

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Urban settlement began at a very early date in Africa. The earliest urban settlements were stone-
walled towns in southern Mauritania that date back to sometime in the second millemium BC.
An explosion of urban settlement in the Sahel region immediately south of the Sahara began
between 600 and 200 BC. The Sahel is a hot, dry savannah that can support human agriculture
and settlement. The first urban settlements were Sahelian: Jenne, Gao, and Kumbi (later Kumbi
Saleh, the capital of the kingdom of Ghana). All of these urban centers grew up in oasis and river
regions which could support such large populations.

African Slave Trade:

Your ancestors are likely to have participated in

the African Slave Trade. The exact numbers of
Africans shipped overseas during the slave trade
are hotly debated - estimates range between 10 and
28 million. Between 1450 and 1900 at least 12
million Africans were taken across the Atlantic -
mainly to colonies in North America, South
America, and the West Indies. Brazil imported
35% of those slaves, mostly of whom came from
west central Africa. European traders would export
manufactured goods to the west coast of Africa
where they would be exchanged for slaves.
However, Europe did not have a monopoly on
slavery. Muslim traders also exported as many as
17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa. Within
central Africa, the slave trade led to huge population upheavals. Coastal tribes fled slave-raiding
parties, and captured slaves were redistributed to different regions in Africa. Slaves were
obtained from along the west coast of Africa with the full and active co-operation of African
kings and merchants. There were occasional military campaigns organized by Europeans to
capture slaves, especially by the Portuguese in what is now Angola, but this accounts for only a
small percentage of the total. In return, the African kings and merchants received various trade
goods including beads, cowrie shells (used as money), textiles, brandy, horses, and perhaps most
importantly, guns. The guns were used to help expand empires and obtain more slaves, until they
were finally used against the European colonizers.

This information is meant to give you a plausible snapshot of what life was like when and where
your maternal line originated. It combines the results of ongoing archaeological, linguistic and
genetic research. Because the study of human pre-history is not exact and must rely on
assumptions, scientists may disagree about the best interpretation of existing knowledge. As
additional research results become available our assumptions may be updated or change
completely. Your maternal inheritance is a small part of your overall inheritance but provides
you with one of the clearest earliest views of your ancestry. It's like finding an especially
beautiful and informative artifact in the remains of an ancient village or campsite. Genelex hopes

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that this information has been exciting and informative to you. We are honored to have played a
role in your search for your genetic ancestors.

Percentage of Population that are Haplogroup L2:

Origin L2a L2b L2c L2*

Cabo Verde 20 4 16 1
Senegal 16 8 21 2
Nigeria 23 1 4 1
Dominican Rep 15 7 13 2
Brazil 3 1 1 1
Mozambique 43 2 1 0
!Kung/Khwe 4 5 0 0

References
1. Sykes, Bryan (2001) The Seven Daughters of Eve. New York, NY: W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc.
2. Olson, Steve (2002) Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes.
Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co.
3. Wallace, Douglas, (2002) The Genomic Revolution, Unveiling the Unity of Life; Using
Maternal and Paternal Genes to Unlock Human History, Joseph Henry Press, pp 131-146
4. Maca-Meyer N, Gonzalez AM, Larruga JM, Flores C and Cabrera VM (2001) Major
genomic mitochondrial lineages delineate early human expansions. BMC Genetics 2:13
5. Salas A; Richards M, De la Fe Tomas, Lareu M, Sobrino B, Sanchez-Diz P, Macaulay V and
Carracedo A, (2002) The Making of the African mtDNA Landscape, Am. J. Hum. Genet., 71,
1082-1111
6. Pereira L, Macaulay V, Torroni A, Scozzari R, Prata M-J, Amorim A (2001) Prehistoric and
historic traces in the mtDNA of Mozambique: insights into the Bantu expansions and the
slave trade. Ann. Hum. Genet 65, 439-458
7. Brehm A, Pereira L, Bandelt H-J, Prata MJ and Amorim A (2002) Mitochondrial portrait of
the Cabo Verde archipelago: the Senegambian outpost of the slave trade. Am. J. Hum. Genet.
66, 49-60
8. Ingman M, Kaessmann H, Pääbo S, Gyllensten U (2000): Mitochondrial genome variation
and the origin of modern humans. Nature 408:708-713
9. Cann RL, Stoneking M, Wilson AC (1987): Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution.
Nature 325:31-36.

BACK TO TCHAMBA see also: Seeing through the whitewash

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