African Pygmies

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.

[8] 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 (1806).

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.

[11][12] The lineage of African Pygmies is strongly associated with mitochondrial (maternal line) haplogroup L1, with a divergence time between 170,000 and 100,000 years ago.

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.

[17] 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.

He argued that the short stature of Pygmy populations can arise relatively quickly (in less than a few millennia) under strong selection pressures.

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.

[22] 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.

[23] L1c prevalence was variously reported as: 100% in Ba-Kola, 97% in Aka (Ba-Benzélé), and 77% in Biaka,[25] 100% of the Bedzan (Tikar), 97% and 100% in the Baka people of Gabon and Cameroon, respectively,[26] 97% in Bakoya (97%), and 82% in Ba-Bongo.

Becker, et al.,[30] suggest African pygmyism may have evolved as an adaptation to the significantly lower average levels of ultraviolet light available beneath the canopy of rainforest environments.

[31] In similar hypothetical scenarios, because of reduced access to sunlight, a comparatively smaller amount of anatomically formulated vitamin D is produced, resulting in restricted dietary calcium uptake, and subsequently restricted bone growth and maintenance, resulting in an overall population average skeletal mass near the lowest periphery of the spectrum among anatomically modern humans.

[33] Additional evidence suggests that, when compared to other Sub-Saharan African populations, African pygmy populations display unusually low levels of expression of the genes encoding for human growth hormone and its receptor associated with low serum levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 and short stature.

We therefore suggest that short stature in these Pygmy groups may have arisen as a consequence of genetic alterations in the thyroid hormone pathway.

The possibility that independent adaptations to an iodine-deficient diet might therefore have contributed to the convergent evolution of the short stature phenotype in Pygmy-like groups around the world deserves further investigation.

Along with the different sounds of the breath and the n'dehou, the musician may also stomp their feet or tap on their chest to add even more dimension and complexity to the music.

[38] In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the Ituri Conflict, Ugandan backed rebel groups were accused by the UN of enslaving Mbutis to prospect for minerals and forage for forest food, with those returning empty handed being killed and eaten.

In neighboring North Kivu province there has been cannibalism by a death squad known as Les Effaceurs ("the erasers") who wanted to clear the land of people to open it up for mineral exploitation.

[47] This population is rapidly decreasing as poverty, intermarriage with Bantu peoples, Westernization, and deforestation gradually destroy their way of life and culture.

The greatest environmental problem the Pygmies face is the loss of their traditional homeland, the tropical forests of Central Africa.

The human rights organization states that, as the forest has receded under logging activities, its original inhabitants have been pushed into populated areas to join the formal economy, working as casual laborers or on commercial farms and being exposed to new diseases.

Commercial sex has been bolstered by logging, which often places large groups of male laborers in camps which are set up in close contact with the Pygmy communities.

Human rights groups have also reported widespread sexual abuse of indigenous women in the conflict-ridden eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

One British medical journal, The Lancet, published a review showing that Pygmy populations often had less access to health care than neighboring communities.

[48] Studies in Cameroon and the DRC in the 1980s and 1990s showed a lower prevalence of HIV in Pygmy populations than among neighboring groups, but recent increases have been recorded.

[48] A consortium of researchers conducted a case study on the Pygmies of Africa and concluded that deforestation has greatly affected their everyday lives.