The unexpected outcome of the tribe that once dominated the earth

The number of members of Khoisan, a small tribe in southern Africa, is only about 100,000. But they used to be the largest tribe in the world.

The evolutionary history of mankind has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, but in the last 22,000 years, tribes in Africa have become the largest human communities in the world. Khoisan, a tribe of them, has become the largest community. They dominate both Africa, Asia and Europe.

Today the people of Khoisan tribe still live by hunting and gathering activities.(Photo: Corbis)

However, the golden era of the Khoisan tribe quickly ended because their numbers fell sharply. Today the total number of people in the tribe is only about 100,000, while the world population has reached 7 billion.

The life of Khoisan tribe has not changed for tens of thousands of years. A study that scientists from the US, Singapore and Brazil published in Nature Communications shows that they still survive by hunting and gathering.

By comparing almost all of the genes of Khoisan tribes members with the genes of 1,462 people in 48 ethnic groups around the world, researchers found that Khoisan men never marry married women. out of tribes for about 150,000 years.

" People of Khoisan tribe always consider themselves the oldest people on earth," said Stephan Schuster, a researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Stephan added that he and his colleagues analyzed 420,000 gene variants to retrieve data. The analysis shows that Khoisan - residing in southern Africa - not only has a different set of genes than Europeans and Asians, but also is different from every tribe in Africa.

"This study and many previous studies show that Khoisan people and the rest of human beings had common ancestors from about 150,000 years ago. So we were extremely surprised to find that Khoisan only marrying people of the same tribe for 150,000 years , " said Webb Miller, a scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

Webb commented that the current Khoisan culture and traditions make strange genes unable to "penetrate" their genomes. Khoisan men only marry women and tribes, while Khoisan women will leave the tribe if they marry men outside the tribe.