Dear Andreas, Thanks for your email! There is just one really good source of information about the Bangwa that I know of, http://www.lebialem.info/. That site collects some of the key works of scholarship on them. There are videos worth seeing on YouTube, too, such as https://youtu.be/DtSzd5qvjh8, which is long, but can be fascinating if you are a good observer. There are a lot of questions in science that are not ready to be resolved, so one can't yet say, "this is considered to be the case," as one could if it were a settled question. Thus, I cannot answer your question per se, "Is Cameroon now considered to be the birth place of Adam?" No one knows where the most recent common paternal ancestor of today's human population lived, and if anyone tells you they do know, I would look at that with a very skeptical eye. I have not seen any recent scientific paper that claims to be able to answer this question yet. The most interesting passage in a fairly recent paper, that I know of, is this, from "An unbiased resource of novel SNP markers provides a new chronology for the human Y chromosome and reveals a deep phylogenetic structure in Africa," by Rosaria Scozzari et al, Genome Research, Jan. 2014. "This geographical confinement of deep lineages is at odds with the mainly eastern African position of sites providing fossils of comparable ages (McDougall et al. 2005, but see Tattersall and Schwartz 2008). The question then becomes: when did these lineages reach central-western Africa? Two hypotheses can be put forward: first, ancient residence of A1b and A1a in eastern Africa, followed by relocating to central-western Africa and extinction in the motherland eastern Africa (possibly together with other yet unknown deep rooted branches), or second, ancient residence of A1b and A1a in central-western Africa, with loss of fossil record there. The finding of the oldest lineage recorded so far (A00, 338 kya) in Cameroon (Mendez et al. 2013), adds to our phylogeographic results in suggesting centralwestern Africa as a broad region populated by deep MSY lineages earlier than 160 kya." There may have been further interesting statements published since then, but this is the best I can offer tonight! One factor that has not been mentioned much by studies of human prehistory is that this area of Cameroon has been a refugium during periods of harsh climate change, resulting in its becoming a biodiversity hotspot, where today the rarest species of Chimpanzees and Gorillas can be found, among other animals. Thus one scenario that could be explored is that humans, like these other primates, could have ended up in Cameroon during one of the dry periods when it provided a haven. If there were other branches dating to the same or earlier period as A00, they could have been lost during those adversities. Since the model that has been gaining the most prominence is the "Braided Stream," with many small and diverse populations of early humans in Africa repeatedly separating and re-joining, it would not be as surprising that one region contributed the oldest Y lineages, while another has the oldest mtDNA, or autosomal DNA. That being said, there is much that cries out to be studied right there in Cameroon, which has some of the greatest ethnic diversity of any country in the world. Due to limited funding, we currently have no short-term plans to study the mtDNA of our samples, but I think it would be a mistake to overlook that angle in the longer term. We are in conversations with Melissa Wilson Sayres, of Arizona State, who hopes to be assisting us in analyzing the data we collect. She thinks, and I agree, that autosomal studies of these Cameroonian populations would be very important and interesting to do in the future. But new samples, collected under a distinct protocol, would have to be gathered for that project, so that we'd have even stronger mechanisms in place to protect the privacy of the sample donors, because of the far greater medical implications of autosomal variation. I would be surprised to hear of any larger concentration of A00 samples being discovered in another country, but of course there are many unstudied, remote or dangerous corners of Africa where very little is known of the people's DNA, compared with the very thorough sampling of European populations. Although I must say it is still hard for me to wrap my head around what could have happened, I would guess that the relatively tiny number of A00 living today suggests that a combination of genetic drift, and perhaps warfare, or subjugation of indigenous peoples by more aggressive warriors, with lack of ideal agricultural land and access to markets creating difficult conditions for subsistence, must have kept A00 from attaining a substantial population size, with isolation in the very rugged and inaccessible mountains of Cameroon allowing them to just barely hang on and survive over so many centuries and millennia. We often see little pockets of rare genetic groups in small, high mountain valleys, as some recent studies on the Caucasus have shown. I hope all who find this really interesting will stop to consider that we are not able to fund our research out of our own pockets, as the cost of testing hundreds of samples at even the most inexpensive prices becomes very high. This can only be done if many people come together to share the burden and make it light. We have so little time left before our deadline. As soon as the Christmas festivities allow, I hope a good number of our kind readers will stop by our website at http://experiment.com/a00west, to support this project financially, allowing us to pay our bills and gather more essential data, for the benefit of all. Bonnie -- *Farther Back We All Connect* On 12/23/2015 9:41 PM, Andreas West wrote: > Dear Bonnie, > > > Thank you for keeping us informed about the progress. I've tried to lookup information about the Bangwa on Wikipedia but couldn't find anything. Only information available is on the Mbo, it's article mentions the Bangwa but there is no standalone article. > > Maybe someone attached to the project would like to write it, especially now from the Adam background. > > Just for my understanding. Is Cameroon now considered to be the birth place of Adam or is that unlikely until a higher percentage of A00 samples are found anywhere else in a location? > > As E1b1a is so much more present there does it mean that most A00 lines unfortunately died out? > > Andreas **