Research on the ancient remains of people who lived in the Oakhurst rock shelter near George from 1,300 to 10,000 years ago has revealed they are genetically similar to the San and Khoekhoe groups living in the region today.
The finding is surprising as similar studies from Europe have found extensive genetic changes due to human migration over the past 10,000 years. It suggests there was little human movement in the area around the Oakhurst rock shelter in the southern Cape until about 1,200 years ago, when farmers and herders from other parts of Africa migrated into the region and started interacting with the local groups.
The farmers contributed northeast African and Levantine ancestry to the genetic makeup of southern African hunter gatherers, while the herders introduced genetic material from West Africa.
The study was conducted by a team of researchers from UCT and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany, who reconstructed the genomes of 13 individuals whose remains were found at the Oakhurst site. The genomes are of different ages, ranging from 10,000 to 1,300 years ago, and enabled the researchers to study human migrations and their relationship to the diverse inhabitants of the region today.
“Oakhurst rock shelter is an ideal site to study human history, as it contained more than 40 human graves and preserved layers of human artefacts, such as stone tools, going back 12,000 years,” said Victoria Gibbon, professor of biological anthropology at UCT and co-author of the study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Ecology and Evolution on September 19.
“Sites like this are rare in SA, and Oakhurst has allowed for a better understanding of local population movements and relationships across the landscape for nearly 9,000 years,” Gibbon said in a statement.
Study co-author Stephan Schiffels, group leader for population genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology archaeology department, said the samples proved challenging to analyse.
“Such ancient and poorly preserved DNA is quite difficult to sequence, and it took several attempts using different technologies and laboratory protocols to extract and process the DNA,” he said.
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