Ballito Bay boy helps ‘rewrite’ human history

Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg excavating at Sibudu Cave (under the direction of Prof Lyn Wadley, University of the Witwatersrand), about 40km southeast of Ballito Bay where the boy was found. Picture: Lyn Wadley, University of the Witwatersrand.

Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg excavating at Sibudu Cave (under the direction of Prof Lyn Wadley, University of the Witwatersrand), about 40km southeast of Ballito Bay where the boy was found. Picture: Lyn Wadley, University of the Witwatersrand.

Published Oct 2, 2017

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Results from a new study of ancient DNA shows that the 2 000-year-old remains of a boy found at Ballito Bay in KwaZulu-Natal during the 1960s, have helped to rewrite human history.

Marlize Lombard, Professor of Stone Age archaeology at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), initiated collaboration with geneticists from Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of the Witwatersrand, who put together a team of experts at the Uppsala laboratory.

“They reconstructed the full genome of the Ballito Bay child, together with the genomes of six other individuals from KwaZulu-Natal who lived between 2300 and 300 years ago,” said UJ on Monday. 

“Three Stone Age individuals who lived between 2 300 and 1 800 years ago were found to be genetically related to the descendants of Khoe-San groups living in southern Africa today. 

“The remains of the other four individuals who lived 500 to 300 years ago during the Iron Age, were genetically related to present-day South Africans of West African descent.”

Because the boy from Ballito Bay was of hunter-gatherer descent, living at a time before migrants from further north in Africa reached South African shores, his DNA could be used to estimate the split between modern humans and earlier human groups as occurring between 350 000 and 260 000 years ago. 

"This means that modern humans emerged earlier than previously thought", says Mattias Jakobsson, population geneticist at Uppsala University, who headed the project together with Lombard.

These findings, it was reported on the UJ website, shed new light on our species' deep African history and show that there is still much more to learn about our process of becoming modern humans.

The researchers noted the increasingly important impact of the interplay between genetics and archaeology. 

Additional sources: University of Johannesburg website and Sciencedaily.com

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