Insights into human demographic history in Africa from a population genomics perspective

Abstract

The history of human populations in Africa is complex and includes various demographic events that influenced patterns of cultural and genetic variation across the continent. In one-third of the African continent, over 350 million people speak one or more of the 500 Bantu languages. Their successful expansion from the west-central region across sub-equatorial Africa is the most dramatic demographic event in Holocene Africa, which fundamentally reshaped the continent's linguistic, cultural, and biological landscape. Through linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and population genomics studies of ancient and modern-day populations, we can gain a better understanding of the expansion of Bantu-speaking populations, as well as other population expansions and large-scale migrations within Holocene Africa (e.g., during the Green Sahara period), which involved food-production and technological innovation and had a significant influence on the distribution of current-day populations. We can also investigate more recent large-scale forced migrations from Africa to the Americas during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This seminar will focus on several population movements of African populations from different regions, and will illustrate how cross-disciplinary research can infer and reconstruct demographic events of migration and admixture in Africa and beyond.

About the Speaker

Cesar Fortes-Lima is a Principal researcher in Population Genomics and Evolutionary Biology at Johns Hopkins University (JHU, USA). His main research achievements centred on leveraging genomic variation to dissect the evolutionary forces involved in human migration, admixture, and selection. His thesis examined the demographic history of African-descendant populations in South America. After obtaining his PhD at Paul Sabatier University (France), he completed successful postdoctoral training at the CNRS-MNHN (France), Uppsala University (Sweden), and JHU (USA). During his training and as a principal investigator, Cesar has co-led multidisciplinary projects to investigate the genomic history of numerous modern and ancient populations across Africa and the Americas, thereby increasing the number of comparative genomic datasets for underrepresented populations. As a sole principal investigator, Cesar secured external competitive funding through national grants in Spain and annual research grants from Swedish Foundations (e.g., the Marcus Borgström Foundation, the Hedström Foundation, and the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund). Hi has also developed novel computational methods for demographic inference in admixed populations using simulations, machine learning, and Approximate Bayesian Computations. His research has therefore contributed to increasing our knowledge of human population history and migrations across the African continent and the African Diaspora.

Seminar Recording