West African Pygmies Share a Common Ancestry
Short people known as pygmies are scattered across the forest regions of central Africa. These hunter-gatherers of the forest belong to different ethnic groups, speak different languages and exhibit a great deal of cultural and physical diversity. However, given their shared short stature, researchers have often wondered whether they have a common ancestry. A report just published in the journal Current Biology suggests that all short-statured people in Western Central Africa diverged from a single population only 2,800 years ago.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, a pygmy is a member of a human group where adult males typically grow to less than 150cm (4 foot 11 inches) in height. It has long been a mystery why the forest-dwelling pygmies of Africa have such a short stature. These groups grow at the same rate as all other humans until they become teenagers. Once they reach adolescence, they do not undergo the final growth spurt typical in most other humans. Anthropologists have often wondered whether this was due to a genetic condition or whether it was the result of adaptive behavior to make life more advantageous to living in the forest, where it can sometimes be difficult to get enough calories to eat. Previous DNA studies were unable to resolve this question.
Compounding the issue, in Western Central Africa, there is no pygmy language. All the forest-dwelling pygmy populations tend to speak the language of their immediate agricultural non-pygmy neighbours. As well, various short-statured groups of Western Central Africa often do not know about each other, there is no archaeological data linking the groups and they have no myth or story about their own origin.
According to researchers, a new genetic study suggests that small tribes of short-statured people populated Western Central Africa as far back as 50,000 to 90,000 years ago. These groups intermixed and interbred until about 2,800 years ago, when they were suddenly displaced. Researchers speculate that other taller groups of humans, who were farmers, invaded their territory and scattered them to the various forest regions of Africa.
Molecular anthropologists now hope to study the pygmies of East Africa to see if they also descend from a common ancestral population.
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