Pre-colonial African history is alive with tales of civilisations rising and falling and of different cultures intermingling across the continent. This means that lots of genetic diversity – or variety – in the DNA of populations is probably being missed by scientists. Dating eventsWe modelled a person’s genome as a mixture of segments of DNA inherited from their ancestors. Those ancestral DNA segments get shorter as the genetic material of their descendants is shuffled with each new generation. The longer the DNA segments matching, for example, west Africans or Europeans, the more recent the mixture event was.

Source: The North Africa Journal April 14, 2023 14:04 UTC