By the 1990s, however, some scholars began to question the idea that Bantu languages and skills spread through a migration. Couldn’t these cultural habits have spread while people stayed in the same place, with hunter gatherer communities passing along new technologies, languages, and habits to each other?
Genetic techniques that could analyze people’s ancestry helped to resolve that debate. All of us share DNA with our relatives: 50 percent on average with siblings, 12.5 percent with cousins, 3.3 percent with second cousins, and so on. Though these proportions become minute the further back in time a shared common ancestor lived, statistical techniques can tease out patterns.
Sure enough, a
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