Ancient DNA from South Africa rock shelter reveals the same human population stayed there for 9,000 years (www.livescience.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by ZeroCool@slrpnk.net to c/archaeology@mander.xyz

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[-] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 13 points 3 weeks ago

Pfft. I’d stay at home way longer if they’d killed the jerk who invented work.

[-] workerONE@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago

The rents must have been low

[-] Deceptichum@quokk.au 4 points 3 weeks ago

Rock bottom prices.

[-] Evil_incarnate@lemm.ee 8 points 3 weeks ago

Vampires confirmed. I believe they were everywhere in Africa before Toto arrived.

[-] Deceptichum@quokk.au 6 points 3 weeks ago

Damn yeah those blessings of the rains would’ve turned it into a holy water apocalypse for vampires.

[-] Microw@lemm.ee 5 points 3 weeks ago

Well this confirms how insanely long ancestors/relatives of San and Khoekhoe have been living there, with no major upheal between 10.000 and 1.000 years ago.

The important part here is not to help a racist narrative that these groups have faced, given that they traditionally are hunter-gatherer societies. We do see that these people had cultural innovations over time. Several stone technological shifts are preserved at the Oakhurst site, and around the same time, are similarly found across archaeological sites in South Africa.

[-] ladicius@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago

Not much travelling over there. Humankind was spread very thin for most of its existence.

[-] Microw@lemm.ee 2 points 3 weeks ago

It is highly unusual for humankind overall, this long period in most parts of Eurasia saw waves and waves of migrations. But in this specific region of Africa, a group of people stayed the same and didn't produce offspring with outsiders for thousands of years.

[-] intensely_human@lemm.ee 2 points 3 weeks ago

Well, they did produce offspring with outsiders. The article mentions others coming in. The genomes are “related” between the three time periods studied.

What didn’t happen was a total replacement by people unrelated to the previous dwellers.

[-] intensely_human@lemm.ee 0 points 3 weeks ago

Very interesting situation. I wonder how they managed to survive without being wiped out for 9,000 years.

As an aside, the writing of this article is kind of scattered. They kept jumping from high level explanations of how the science works, to descriptions of the site, to descritpions of the findings, to techniques, and back and forth.

this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024

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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

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