Congo Basin foragers carry some of humanity's oldest surviving genetic lineages
The forest peoples of Central Africa, long labelled Pygmies, split from other African populations well over 100,000 years ago by genetic estimates. Most dislike the umbrella name, preferring Mbuti, Twa or Bayaka, and many kept fragments of a lost forest vocabulary inside the languages they adopted from farming neighbours.
Three broad groups are usually distinguished. The western Bambenga live in Cameroon, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic; the Bambuti occupy the Ituri Rainforest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and the Twa are scattered across Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, Namibia and beyond. The Southern Twa, whose men average above 155 cm, are sometimes set apart as 'Pygmoid'. A 2016 estimate counted roughly 900,000 forest-dwelling people, about 60% of them in the DRC.
The label comes from a Greek word for a mythical dwarf, itself tied to pygme, a fist-to-elbow measure. Europeans applied it to Africans in the early 1800s, starting in English with John Barrow in 1806, but it was widely treated as fable until explorers Paul Du Chaillu and Georg Schweinfurth reported meeting such communities in the 1860s. Reporting in 1996 found broad dislike of the term among the peoples themselves, and 'Central African foragers' has gained some use since the 2000s.
Genetic studies point to deep roots. The maternal haplogroup L1 dominates, with divergence dated between 170,000 and 100,000 years ago, and one estimate separates these foragers from West and East Africans by about 130,000 years. Research by Patin and colleagues in 2009 placed a split between eastern and western groups around 20,000 years ago. Farmers speaking Central Sudanic and Ubangian languages arrived after about 5,500 years ago, and Bantu speakers from about 3,500 years ago, and forest communities adopted their languages.
Yet traces survive: roughly 30% of the vocabulary in Aka and Baka comes from neither neighbouring family, much of it about plants and honey collecting. Linguist Roger Blench doubts this proves a single ancestral 'Pygmy' tongue, arguing that several groups independently adapted to forest life and that short stature can evolve within a few millennia. Today no community lives wholly apart; all trade with farmers for crops and goods.
Source: African Pygmies
