Phylogenetic and phylogeographic analysis of African mitochondrial DNA variation
Sadie Anderson-Mann, March 2006With mitochondrial DNA lineages tracing back more than 100,000 years, the genetic diversity
present throughout Africa is unparalleled. Within this continent, a wide array of different
mitochondrial haplotypes are found; as a result of the numerous demographic movements
that this region has witnessed, these have been differentially dispersed, some being
geographically localised whilst others are found over a large proportion of the continent.
Along with the Atlantic slave trade, the Bantu dispersals are the most recent of population
movements to have had significant effect on the genetic landscape of Africa, and are
associated with the distribution of several different haplogroups. Here, phylogenetic and
phylogeographic analysis of over 2,000 predominantly sub-Saharan African mtDNA
sequences has been carried out, through construction of reduced median and, where
necessary, median joining networks, based on mtDNA hypervariable segment 1 (HVS-I)
variation.
A big article that I will read sometime I don’t have food poisoning. It contains a lot of info about the Bantu expansion in it.
