BACKGROUND: Today, African pastoralists are found mainly in the Sahel/Savannah belt spanning 6,000 km from west to east, flanked by the Sahara to the north and tropical rainforests to the south. The most significant group among them are the Fulani who not only keep cattle breeds of possible West Eurasian ancestry, but form themselves a gene pool containing some paternally and maternally-transmitted West Eurasian haplogroups. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We generated complete sequences for 33 mitogenomes belonging to haplogroups H1 and U5 (23 and 10, respectively), and genotyped 16 STRs in 65 Y chromosomes belonging to haplogroup R1b-V88. RESULTS: We show that age estimates of the maternal lineage H1cb1, occurring almost exclusively in the Fulani, point to the time when the first cattle herders settled the Sahel/Savannah belt. Similar age estimates were obtained for paternal lineage R1b-V88, which occurs today in the Fulani but also in other, mostly pastoral populations. Maternal clade U5b1b1b, reported earlier in the Berbers, shows a shallower age, suggesting another possibly independent input into the Sahelian pastoralist gene pool. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the fact that animal domestication originated in the Near East ∼ 10 ka, and that it was from there that animals such as sheep, goats as well as cattle were introduced into Northeast Africa soon thereafter, contemporary cattle keepers in the Sahel/Savannah belt show uniparental genetic affinities that suggest the possibility of an ancient contact with an additional ancestral population of western Mediterranean ancestry.

Archaeogenetics Laboratory Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Czech Republic

Département d'Histoire Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar Senegal

Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics Faculty of Science Charles University Prague Czech Republic

Department of Biology University Tor Vergata Rome Italy

Department of Forensic Genetics Institute of Criminalistics Prague Czech Republic

Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade do Porto Porto Portugal

Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde Universidade do Porto Porto Portugal

Instituto de Patologia e Imunologia Molecular da Universidade do Porto Porto Portugal

References provided by Crossref.org

Violence exposure is associated with preference for masculine faces: evidence from Senegal

Population history and admixture of the Fulani people from the Sahel

A Population Genetic Perspective on Subsistence Systems in the Sahel/Savannah Belt of Africa and the Historical Role of Pastoralism

Demographic and Selection Histories of Populations Across the Sahel/Savannah Belt

Circum-Saharan Prehistory through the Lens of mtDNA Diversity

Population history and genetic adaptation of the Fulani nomads: inferences from genome-wide data and the lactase persistence trait