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The San people of southern Africa are claimed to be the living human group with the most ancient divergence from the rest of humanity, around 200,000 years ago.
by meri_dian 9y ago
The San people of southern Africa are claimed to be the living human group with the most ancient divergence from the rest of humanity, around 200,000 years ago. That they are so similar to the rest of humanity has always made me wonder if the commonly accepted divergence date ranges should be pushed back.
From the Wiki:
"A DNA study of fully sequenced genomes, published in September 2016, showed that the ancestors of today's San hunter-gatherers began to diverge from other human populations in Africa about 200,000 years ago and were fully isolated by 100,000 years ago, well before the first archaeological evidence of modern behaviour in humans."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people?wprov=sfla1
- Danihan 9y agoDo you know if they are related to the Berbers?
- hasenj 9y agoSeems rather unlikely, given their appearance.
- micheljones 9y agoWell, we are all related to each other, the only question is how _closely_ related we are. And as for that, any non-Khoisan/non-Pygmy human subgroup is more closely related to any other non-Khoisan/non-Pygmy subgroup than they are to Khoisan or Pygmy people. In other words, Khoisan and Pygmyies are the most distant cousins to all other homo sapiens (diverged from us 175-200 thousand years ago).
- tim333 9y agoI guess evolutionary change is gradual so it's hard to have a cut off date for when pre homo sapien ancestors had kids that counted as homo sapiens. The origins of cooking going back 1.9 million years implies the ancestors must have been a bit human like. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/22/cooking-origins-homo-erectus https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/22/cooking-orig...
- sulam 9y agoEvolution is not single speed. For a relatively static population with no need to change their lifestyle it will run more slowly. For a dynamic population with bottlenecks it can run very quickly.
- micheljones 9y agoNot only that, their divergence date (cca 175kya-200kya), combined with the fact that they have language, culture and art disproves the 'behavioral modernity' theory which posits that human brains evolved to use language and produce culture and art relatively recently (30kya) based on the oldest currently available archeological finds of expressions of culture/art.