While serfs toiled and knights jousted in Europe and samurai and shoguns rose to power in Japan, the medieval peoples of the Swahili civilization on the coast of East Africa lived in multicultural, coral-stone towns and engaged in trade networks spanning the Indian Ocean.
- By STEPHANIE DUTCHEN
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists have been locked in a century-long debate about how much people from outside Africa contributed to Swahili culture and ancestry. Swahili communities have their own histories, and evidence points in multiple directions.
The largest-yet analysis of ancient DNA in Africa, which includes the first ancient DNA recovered from members of the Swahili civilization, has now broken the stalemate.
The study reveals that a significant number of people from Southwest Asia moved to the Swahili coast in medieval and early modern times and had children with the people living there. Yet the research also shows that hallmarks of the Swahili civilization predated those arrivals.
"Archaeological evidence overwhelmingly showed that the medieval Swahili civilization was an African one, but we still wanted to understand and contextualize the nonlocal heritage," said co-senior author Chapurukha Kusimba, professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida.
"Taking a genetics pathway to find the answers took courage and opened doors beyond which lie answers that force us to think in new ways," he said.
The analyses, published March 30 in Nature, included the newly sequenced ancient DNA of 80 individuals from the Swahili coast and inland neighbors dating from 1300 CE to 1900 CE.
They also included new genomic sequences from 93 present-day Swahili speakers and previously published genetic data from a variety of ancient and present-day eastern African and Eurasian groups.
The international team was led by Kusimba and David Reich, professor of genetics in the Blatavnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.
Mixing between Asia and Africa
The study revealed that around 1000 CE, a stream of migrants from Southwest Asia intermingled with African people at multiple locations along the Swahili coast, contributing close to half of the ancestry of the analyzed ancient individuals.
"The results provide unambiguous evidence of ongoing cultural mixing on the East African coast for more than a millennium, in which African people interacted and had families with immigrants from other parts of Africa and the Indian Ocean world," said Reich.
The study confirmed that the bedrock of Swahili culture remained unchanged even as the newcomers arrived and Islam became a dominant regional religion, said Kusimba; the primary language, tomb architecture, cuisine, material culture, and matrilocal marriage residence and matriarchal kinship remained African and Bantu in nature.
The findings contradict one widely discussed scholarly view, which held that there was little contribution from foreigners to Swahili peoples, the authors said.
The researchers added that the findings also refute a diametrically opposed viewpoint prevalent in colonial times, which held that Africans provided little contribution to the Swahili towns.
"Ancient DNA allowed us to address a longstanding controversy that could not be tested without genetic data from these times and places," Reich said.
The researchers found that the initial waves of newcomers were mainly from Persia. These findings align with the oldest Swahili oral stories, which tell of Persian (Shirazi) merchants or princes arriving on the Swahili shores.
"It was exciting to find biological evidence that Swahili oral history probably depicts Swahili genetic ancestry as well as cultural legacy," said Esther Brielle, research fellow in genetics in the Reich lab.
Brielle is co-first author of the paper with Stephanie Wynne-Jones at the University of York and Jeffrey Fleisher at Rice University.
After about 1500 CE, ancestry sources became increasingly Arabian. In later centuries, intermingling with other populations from Asia and Africa further changed the genetic makeup of Swahili-coast communities.
