The team members also used a “breakaway model” when assembling the language family tree. In this scenario, at every split in the language tree, one of the populations stayed in the same place, while the other migrated, explained team member Remco Bouckaert. The study concluded that the Bantu expansion occurred about 4,000 years ago—long before a savanna corridor alongside the rainforest is thought to have opened up around 2,500 years ago. It had been previously thought that Bantu populations would not have been able to maintain their crops and cattle while migrating through dense rain forest. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Source: Libya Today August 08, 2022 22:36 UTC