African Pygmies and neighboring farmers separated around 60,000 years ago.Byline: ANI Washington, April 10 (ANI): An international study has suggested that the ancestors of present-day African Pygmies and farmers separated 60,000 years ago. The study, led by researchers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, determined that all African Pygmies, inhabiting a large territory extending west-to-east along Central Africa, descend from a unique population who lived around 20,000 years ago. Pygmies are characterized by a forest-dwelling hunter-gathering lifestyle and distinctive cultural practices and physical traits (e.g., low stature). Two groups of Pygmy populations live in the African rainforests: the "Western Pygmies" and the "Eastern Pygmies". The common origins of the two groups of Pygmies, separated by thousands of kilometers, have been long debated, and their relationships with neighboring neigh·bor n. 1. One who lives near or next to another. 2. A person, place, or thing adjacent to or located near another. 3. A fellow human. 4. Used as a form of familiar address. v. farmers remained obscure. The researchers, led by Lluis Quintana-Murci, studied the genetic profile of twelve populations of Pygmies and neighboring farmers dispersed over the African continent, using sequence data from non-coding regions of their genomes. Using simulation-based procedures, they determined that the ancestors of Pygmy hunter-gatherers and farming populations started to diverge diverge - If a series of approximations to some value get progressively further from it then the series is said to diverge. The reduction of some term under some evaluation strategy diverges if it does not reach a normal form after a finite number of reductions. 60,000 years ago, coinciding with a period of important human migration both within and outside Africa. Much later, 20,000 years ago, Western and Eastern Pygmies separated, concurrently with a period of climate change leading to large retreats of the equatorial equatorial /equa·to·ri·al/ (e?kwah-tor´e-al) 1. pertaining to an equator. 2. occurring at the same distance from each extremity of an axis. rainforest into refugia In the most basic biological sense refugia (singular: refugium) are locations of isolated or relict populations of once widespread animal or plant species. This isolation (allopatry) can be due to climatic changes or human activities such as deforestation and over-hunting. . The common origin of all Pygmies unmasked in this study led Etienne Patin pat·in n. Variant of paten. , one of the leading authors, to conclude that "they have probably inherited their distinctive shared physical traits, such as low height, from a common ancestor, rather than by convergent adaptation to the rainforest". However, complete genome-wide profiles of these populations are now needed, both to characterize more precisely their demographic history Demographic history may refer to:
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