African Pygmies


The African Pygmies are a group of ethnicities native to Central Africa, mostly the Congo Basin, traditionally subsisting on a forager and hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They are divided into three roughly geographic groups:
  • The western Bambenga, or Mbenga,
  • the eastern Bambuti, or Mbuti, of the Congo Basin
  • the central and southern Batwa, or Twa. The more widely scattered Southern Twa are also grouped under the term Pygmoid.
They are notable for, and named for, their short stature. They are assumed to be descended from the original Middle Stone Age expansion of anatomically modern humans to Central Africa, albeit substantially affected by later migrations from West Africa, from their first appearance in the historical record in the 19th century limited to a comparatively small area within Central Africa, greatly decimated by the prehistoric Bantu expansion, and to the present time widely affected by enslavement at the hands of neighboring Bantu, Ubangian and Central Sudanic groups.
Most contemporary Pygmy groups partially forage and partially trade with neighboring farmers to acquire cultivated foods and material items; no group lives deep in the forest without access to agricultural products. A total number of about 900,000 Pygmies were estimated to be living in the central African forests in 2016, about 60% of this number in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The number does not include Southern Twa populations, who live outside of the Central Africa forest environment, partly in open swamp or desert environments.
Additionally, West African hunter-gatherers may have dwelled in western Central Africa earlier than 32,000 BP and dwelled in West Africa between 16,000 BP and 12,000 BP until as late as 1000 BP or some period of time after 1500 CE. West African hunter-gatherers, many of whom dwelt in the forest–savanna region, were ultimately acculturated and admixed into larger groups of West African agriculturalists, akin to the migratory Bantu-speaking agriculturalists and their encounters with Central African hunter-gatherers.

Name

The term Pygmy, as used to refer to diminutive people, derives from Greek πυγμαῖος pygmaios, a term for "dwarf" from Greek mythology. The word is derived from πυγμή pygmē, a term for "cubit", suggesting a diminutive height.
The use of "Pygmy" in reference to the small-framed African hunter-gatherers dates to the early 19th century, in English first by John Barrow, Travels Into the Interior of Southern Africa. However, the term was used diffusely, and treated as unsubstantiated claims of "dwarf tribes" among the Bushmen of the interior of Africa, until the exploration of the Congo basin. In the 1860s, two Western explorers, Paul Du Chaillu and Georg Schweinfurth, claimed to have found the mythical "Pygmies". A commentator wrote in 1892 that, thirty years ago, "nobody believed in the existence of African dwarf tribes" and that "it needed an authority like Dr. Schweinfurth to prove that pygmies actually exist in Africa". "African Pygmy" is used for disambiguation from "Asiatic Pygmy", a name applied to the Negrito populations of Southeast Asia.
Dembner reported a universal "disdain for the term 'pygmy among the Pygmy peoples of Central Africa: the term is considered a pejorative, and people prefer to be referred to by the name of their respective ethnic or tribal groups, such as Bayaka, Mbuti and Twa. There is no clear replacement for the term "Pygmy" in reference to the umbrella group. A descriptive term that has seen some use since the 2000s is "Central African foragers".
Regional names used collectively of the western group of Pygmies are Bambenga, used in the Kongo language, and Bayaka, used in the Central African Republic.

Groups

The Congo Pygmy speak languages of the Niger–Congo and Central Sudanic language families. There has been significant intermixing between the Bantu and Pygmies.
There are at least a dozen Pygmy groups, sometimes unrelated to each other.
They are grouped in three geographical categories:
African Pygmies are often assumed to be the direct descendants of the Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherer peoples of the central African rainforest.
Genetic evidence for the deep separation of Congo Pygmies from the lineage of West Africans and East Africans, as well as admixture from archaic humans, was found in the 2010s. The lineage of African Pygmies is strongly associated with mitochondrial haplogroup L1, with a divergence time between 170,000 and 100,000 years ago.
They were partially absorbed or displaced by later immigration of agricultural peoples of the Central Sudanic and Ubangian phyla beginning after about 5,500 years ago, and, beginning about 3,500 years ago, by the Bantu, adopting their languages.

Linguistic substrate

Substantial non-Bantu and non-Ubangian substrates have been identified in Aka and in Baka, respectively, on the order of 30% of the lexicon. Much of this vocabulary is botanical, deals with honey harvesting, or is otherwise specialized for the forest and is shared between the two western Pygmy groups. This substrate has been suggested as representing a remnant of an ancient "western Pygmy" linguistic phylum, dubbed "Mbenga" or "Baaka". However, as substrate vocabulary has been widely borrowed between Pygmies and neighboring peoples, no reconstruction of such a "Baaka" language is possible for times more remote than a few centuries ago.
An ancestral Pygmy language has been postulated for at least some Pygmy groups, based on the observation of linguistic substrates. According to Merritt Ruhlen, "African Pygmies speak languages belonging to either the Nilo-Saharan or the Niger–Kordofanian family. It is assumed that Pygmies once spoke their own language, but that, through living in symbiosis with other Africans, in prehistorical times, they adopted languages belonging to these two families."
Roger Blench criticized the hypothesis of an ancestral "Pygmy language", arguing that even if there is evidence for a common ancestral language rather than just borrowing, it will not be sufficient to establish a specifically "Pygmy" origin rather than any of the several potential language isolates of hunter-gatherer populations that ring the rainforest. He argued that the Pygmies do not form the residue of a single ancient stock of Central African hunter-gatherers, but that they are rather descended from several neighboring ethno-linguistic groups, independently adapting to forest subsistence strategies. Blench adduced the lack of clear linguistic and archaeological evidence for the antiquity of the African Pygmies, that the genetic evidence, at the time of his writing, was inconclusive, and that there is no evidence of the Pygmies having a hunting technology distinctive from that of their neighbors. He argued that the short stature of Pygmy populations can arise relatively quickly under strong selection pressures.
West African hunter-gatherers may have spoken a set of presently extinct Sub-Saharan West African languages. In the northeastern region of Nigeria, Jalaa, a language isolate, may have been a descending language from the original set of languages spoken by West African hunter-gatherers.

Genetics

Genetic studies have found evidence that African Pygmies are descended from the Middle Stone Age people of Central Africa, with a separation time from West and East Africans of the order 130,000 years.
African Pygmies in the historical period have been significantly displaced by, and assimilated to, several waves of Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan speakers, of the Central Sudanic, Ubangian, and Bantu phyla.
Genetically, African pygmies have some key differences between them and Bantu peoples. African pygmies' uniparental markers display the most ancient divergence from other human groups among anatomically modern humans, second only to those displayed among some Khoisan populations. Researchers identified an ancestral and autochthonous lineage of mtDNA shared by Pygmies and Bantus, suggesting that both populations were originally one, and that they started to diverge from common ancestors around 70,000 years ago. After a period of isolation, during which current phenotype differences between Pygmies and Bantu farmers accumulated, Pygmy women started marrying male Bantu farmers. This trend started around 40,000 years ago, and continued until several thousand years ago. Subsequently, the Pygmy gene pool was not enriched by external gene influxes.
Mitochondrial haplogroup L1c is strongly associated with pygmies, especially with Bambenga groups. L1c prevalence was variously reported as: 100% in Ba-Kola, 97% in Aka, and 77% in Biaka, 100% of the Bedzan, 97% and 100% in the Baka people of Gabon and Cameroon, respectively, 97% in Bakoya, and 82% in Ba-Bongo. Mitochondrial haplogroups L2a and L0a are prevalent among the Bambuti.
Patin, et al. suggest two unique, late Pleistocene divergences from other human populations, and a split between eastern and western pygmy groups about 20,000 years ago.

Ancient DNA

Ancient DNA was able to be obtained from two Shum Laka foragers from the early period of the Stone to Metal Age, in 8000 BP, and two Shum Laka foragers from the late period of the Stone to Metal Age, in 3000 BP.
The mitochondrial DNA and Y-Chromosome haplogroups found in the ancient Shum Laka foragers were Sub-Saharan African haplogroups. Two earlier Shum Laka foragers were of haplogroup L0a2a1 – broadly distributed throughout modern African populations – and two later Shum Laka foragers were of haplogroup L1c2a1b – distributed among both modern West and Central African agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers. One earlier Shum Laka forager was of haplogroup B and one later Shum Laka forager haplogroup B2b, which, together, as macrohaplogroup B, is distributed among modern Central African hunter-gatherers.
The autosomal admixture of the four ancient Shum Laka forager children was ~35% Western Central African hunter-gatherer and ~65% Basal West African – or, an admixture composed of a modern western Central African hunter-gatherer unit, a modern West African unit, existing locally before 8000 BP, and a modern East African/West African unit likely from further north in the regions of the Sahel and Sahara.
The two earlier Shum Laka foragers from 8000 BP and two later Shum Laka foragers from 3000 BP show 5000 years of population continuity in region. Yet, modern peoples of Cameroon are more closely related to modern West Africans than to the ancient Shum Laka foragers. Modern Cameroonian hunter-gatherers, while partly descended, are not largely descended from the Shum Laka foragers, due to the apparent absence of descent from Basal West Africans.
The Bantu expansion is hypothesized to have originated in a homeland of Bantu-speaking peoples located around western Cameroon, a part of which Shum Laka is viewed as being of importance in the early period of this expansion. By 3000 BP, the Bantu expansion is hypothesized to have already begun. Yet, the sampled ancient Shum Laka foragers – two from 8000 BP and two from 3000 BP – show that most modern Niger–Congo speakers are greatly distinct from the ancient Shum Laka foragers, thus, showing that the ancient Shum Laka people were not the ancestral source population of the modern Bantu-speaking peoples.
While Southern African hunter-gatherers are generally recognized as being the earliest divergent modern human group, having diverged from other groups around 250,000–200,000 BP, as a result of the sampling of the ancient Shum Laka foragers, Central African hunter-gatherers are shown to have likely diverged at a similar time, if not even earlier.