Another response by Etienne Patin, lead author of Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set, to a follow up post:
As to your hypothesis represented by the cladogram, this is a quite reasonable and interesting idea. Actually, the only method that we could use to prove it is to find human remains of Pygmies dating back to Bantu expansions, in regions that were colonized by Bantus. Population genetics cannot infer the presence of extinct populations. However, as stated in our article, Western and Eastern Pygmies may have suffered non-negligible population size shrinkages, which could be due either to Bantu expansions, or to many other factors such as epidemics. Another point in favor of your hypothesis is that some populations of Pygmies (not yet studied ethnologically) may live between present-day Western and Eastern Pygmy groups. Bantu myths often refer to a primordial ...
