The peopling of the last Green Sahara revealed by high-coverage resequencing of trans-Saharan patrilineages.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Little is known about the peopling of the Sahara during the Holocene climatic optimum, when the desert was replaced by a fertile environment.

Results

In order to investigate the role of the last Green Sahara in the peopling of Africa, we deep-sequence the whole non-repetitive portion of the Y chromosome in 104 males selected as representative of haplogroups which are currently found to the north and to the south of the Sahara. We identify 5,966 mutations, from which we extract 142 informative markers then genotyped in about 8,000 subjects from 145 African, Eurasian and African American populations. We find that the coalescence age of the trans-Saharan haplogroups dates back to the last Green Sahara, while most northern African or sub-Saharan clades expanded locall

SUBMITTER: D'Atanasio E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5809971 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature