Phylogeographic analysis of the Bantu language expansion supports a rainforest route.

ABSTRACT: The Bantu expansion transformed the linguistic, economic, and cultural composition of sub-Saharan Africa. However, the exact dates and routes taken by the ancestors of the speakers of the more than 500 current Bantu languages remain uncertain. Here, we use the recently developed "break-away" geographical diffusion model, specially designed for modeling migrations, with "augmented" geographic information, to reconstruct the Bantu language family expansion. This Bayesian phylogeographic approach with augmented geographical data provides a powerful way of linking linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data to test hypotheses about large language family expansions. We compare four hypotheses: an early major split north of the rainforest; a migration through the Sangha River Interval corridor

SUBMITTER: Koile E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9372543 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature