The Comoros Show the Earliest Austronesian Gene Flow into the Swahili Corridor

At the dawn of the second millennium, the expansion of the Indian Ocean trading network aligned with the emergence of an outward-oriented community along the East African coast to create a cosmopolitan cultural and trading zone known as the Swahili Corridor. On the basis of analyses of new genome-wide genotyping data and uniparental data in 276 individuals from coastal Kenya and the Comoros islands, along with large-scale genetic datasets from the Indian Ocean rim, we reconstruct historical population dynamics to show that the Swahili Corridor is largely an eastern Bantu genetic continuum.

Source: The American Journal of Human Genetics - January 4, 2018 Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Authors: Nicolas Brucato, Veronica Fernandes, St éphane Mazières, Pradiptajati Kusuma, Murray P. Cox, Joseph Wainaina Ng’ang’a, Mohammed Omar, Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle, Coralie Frassati, Farida Alshamali, Bertrand Fin, Anne Boland, Jean-Francois Deleuze, Tags: Article Source Type: research