Ancient DNA can reveal much about the genetic history of Africa because it predate major events like slavery and colonialism, which upended African populations and territories.
have also been raised about taking skeletal samples out of Africa and into Western laboratories for the destructive process of genetic sequencing. Moreover, the results may fuel ancestry claims over territories or cultural heritage, and therefore affect living people who did not consent to the research.and a number of African aDNA projects are underway.
There’s a fundamental tension: You don’t know which skeletons and sites will have aDNA preserved, so you just have to try them all. But if we try them all now, in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 50 years, the science might be completely different, and we may have limited ourselves in the future. So it’s a tight line to walk.Across a continent as big of Africa, [countries] with individual, imposed colonial histories have very different ways of approaching their own national heritage.
Many of the criticisms of other DNA projects are that it’s DNA first, Anthropology second. This was really an Anthropology first project. It’s driven by questions that myself and many other anthropologists have been asking for decades, but integrating this new line of evidence, DNA. It’s absolutely really exciting that we might have this new line of evidence, but DNA will not be the magic key to all of these answers. It’s not to the exclusion of decades and hundreds of years of pottery studies, ancient tool studies, landscape archaeology, ethnographies. These are all just pieces of a puzzle that we need to put together. This is always going to have to be an interdisciplinary effort, where we work with other types of scientists and we work with local communities.
We’ve sampled from institutions in Tanzania and Zambia and Kenya. This will be one of the largest African DNA studies to date when it comes out. It’s blown my mind. I hope it will blow many other peoples’ minds.
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