The first complete ancient African Genome has been discovered from excavations in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia, a Kathryn Arthur archeology team in Ethiopia announced on Friday.
The team, led by Gamo elders visited the Mota Cave which is found in the Gamo Highlands in south-western Ethiopia in 2011.
One year later, the team incorporated international archeologists and found the first complete African Genome after excavating the Mota Cave. The ancient DNA extracted from the skeleton provides the ancient human Genome sequenced from the African continent. The human male skeleton is reportedly 4,500 years old.
Archeologists had given him the name Bayira meaning “first born” in the Gamo language, in honor of the ethnic group that lives in the area today.
The morphology and the DNA indicate that Bayira was a male, who was 30 to 50 years old when he died. Bayira was buried 46 to 60 centimeters below the present cave floor surface in an ashy layer and under a small stone cairn of basalt rocks.
According to the report released after the DNA extraction, besides being the first ancient Genome sequenced from Africa, Bayira predates a migration of humans from west Eurasia in to the Horn of Africa about 3000 years ago.
Bayira’s genetic sequence does not contain any traces of West Eurasia genes, supporting the idea that more recent population movements are more responsible for Eurasian admixture in to modern African population.
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