DNA helps map the ancestry of Europe
crisis that needs to be addressed soon.”
Sipho Khumalo, spokesman for the Department of Community Safety, said the conflict could be resolved with a “genuine willingness” to negotiate from the concerned groups: “We see people being murdered at supermarkets and outside (the hostel).”
Khumalo said it would be difficult for the service to police all 20 000 hostel residents, but the issue of the army had not been raised: “Only the president can deploy the army.”
DA provincial leader Zwakele Mncwango yesterday called for the ANC to intervene and stop the killings, and last week urged Premier Senzo Mchunu to intervene.
Independent community activist Vanessa Burger said she was only aware of three Glebelands cases that are before the courts. “Nobody has been convicted to date.” She, too, has in the past urged that the army be brought in to patrol the hostels and conduct searches for illegal weapons.
Police spokesman Brigadier Jay Naicker said: “This conflict has placed an enormous strain on the police because the residents of this housing complex choose to resolve their differences through violence, rather than a negotiated settlement.” DNA EXTRACTED from a skull and a molar tooth of ancient human remains discovered in the southern Caucasus region of Georgia is helping sort out the multifaceted ancestry of modern Europeans.
Scientists said they sequenced the genomes of two individuals, one from 13 300 years ago and the other from 9 700 years ago, and found they represented a previously unknown lineage that contributed significantly to the genetics of modern Europeans.
These individuals were members of hunter-gatherer groups that settled in the Caucasus region, where southern Russia meets Georgia, about 45 000 years ago, after our species trekked out of Africa to populate other parts of the world.
At the time, Europe was populated by Neanderthals.
The Caucasus hunter-gatherers became isolated there for millennia during the last Ice Age. The thaw at the end of the Ice Age brought them into contact with other peoples, leading to the advent of a culture of horse-riding herders who swept into western Europe around 5 000 years ago, bringing metallurgy and animal-herding skills, they added.
“Modern Europeans are a mix of ancient ancestral strands,” Trinity College Dublin geneticist Daniel Bradley, said. “The only way to untangle the modern weave is to sequence genomes from thousands of years ago, before the mixing took place.”
Until now, only three such ancestral strands had been identified flowing from ancient populations.
The Caucasus inhabitants comprised a previously unidentified “fourth strand”, said University of Cambridge geneticist Andrea Manica, noting that they contributed significantly not only to the ancestry of Europe but also to people in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. – Reuters