Pre-colonial African history is alive with tales of civilisations rising and falling and of different cultures intermingling across the continent. We have now shed more light on some of these societies using the science of genetics.
In a study published in Science Advances, my co-authors and I used DNA information from people from the present-day continent to shed light on important civilisations that existed before colonialism. Genetic information from cheek swabs was extracted by machines. Once the sequence of “letters” in the DNA code had been read, or sequenced, we could use computers to compare genetic differences and similarities between the populations in the study.
