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      Modelling the Spread of Farming in the Bantu-Speaking Regions of Africa: An Archaeology-Based Phylogeography

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      1 , * , 2 , 3 , 1 , 2
      PLoS ONE
      Public Library of Science

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          Abstract

          We use archaeological data and spatial methods to reconstruct the dispersal of farming into areas of sub-Saharan Africa now occupied by Bantu language speakers, and introduce a new large-scale radiocarbon database and a new suite of spatial modelling techniques. We also introduce a method of estimating phylogeographic relationships from archaeologically-modelled dispersal maps, with results produced in a format that enables comparison with linguistic and genetic phylogenies. Several hypotheses are explored. The ‘deep split’ hypothesis suggests that an early-branching eastern Bantu stream spread around the northern boundary of the equatorial rainforest, but recent linguistic and genetic work tends not to support this. An alternative riverine/littoral hypothesis suggests that rivers and coastlines facilitated the migration of the first farmers/horticulturalists, with some extending this to include rivers through the rainforest as conduits to East Africa. More recently, research has shown that a grassland corridor opened through the rainforest at around 3000–2500 BP, and the possible effect of this on migrating populations is also explored. Our results indicate that rivers and coasts were important dispersal corridors, but do not resolve the debate about a ‘Deep Split’. Future work should focus on improving the size, quality and geographical coverage of the archaeological 14C database; on augmenting the information base to establish descent relationships between archaeological sites and regions based on shared material cultural traits; and on refining the associated physical geographical reconstructions of changing land cover.

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          Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World: A New Map of Life on Earth

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            IntCal09 and Marine09 Radiocarbon Age Calibration Curves, 0–50,000 Years cal BP

            The IntCal04 and Marine04 radiocarbon calibration curves have been updated from 12 cal kBP (cal kBP is here defined as thousands of calibrated years before AD 1950), and extended to 50 cal kBP, utilizing newly available data sets that meet the IntCal Working Group criteria for pristine corals and other carbonates and for quantification of uncertainty in both the14C and calendar timescales as established in 2002. No change was made to the curves from 0–12 cal kBP. The curves were constructed using a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) implementation of the random walk model used for IntCal04 and Marine04. The new curves were ratified at the 20th International Radiocarbon Conference in June 2009 and are available in the Supplemental Material atwww.radiocarbon.org.
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              Bayesian Analysis of Radiocarbon Dates

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2014
                31 January 2014
                : 9
                : 1
                : e87854
                Affiliations
                [1 ]School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
                [2 ]Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
                [3 ]School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter, United Kingdom
                University of Oxford, United Kingdom
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: TR FS JS. Performed the experiments: TR FS JS. Analyzed the data: TR FS JS. Wrote the paper: TR FS JS.

                Article
                PONE-D-13-30487
                10.1371/journal.pone.0087854
                3909244
                24498213
                d6d1aedf-fdb8-4e70-8e00-148e31e3f459
                Copyright @ 2014

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 24 July 2013
                : 1 January 2014
                Page count
                Pages: 9
                Funding
                The authors also gratefully acknowledge the AHRC (UK) for financial support to the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at UCL, London, which supported our database compilation and subsequent collaborations and a Knowledge Interchange and Collaboration (KIC) travel grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF), South Africa which supported travel to the UK. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology
                Population Biology
                Population Modeling
                Social and Behavioral Sciences
                Archaeology
                Archaeometry
                Radioactive Carbon Dating
                Geography
                Cartography
                GIS
                Human Geography
                Historical Geography
                Linguistics
                Historical Linguistics
                Linguistic Geography

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                Uncategorized

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