Geneticists sequencing the remains of a late-Pleistocene individual from the Zambezi Delta in Mozambique have uncovered a "lost" lineage of African hunter-gatherers. The research, appearing in Cell Reports, identifies a unique genetic signature of resistance to Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). This represents the earliest known biological adaptation to the parasitic disease in humans, suggesting that the population had inhabited the tsetse-fly-dominated delta for thousands of years.
The study provides critical insights into the deep history of human health in Africa. The data shows that this population diverged from other sub-Saharan lineages approximately 30,000 years ago, maintaining a small, isolated breeding pool that allowed these specialized survival genes to become fixed. This discovery reshapes our understanding of early human migration and pathogen selection in tropical environments.