Hausa People - Genetics

Genetics

According to a Y-DNA study by Hassan et al. (2008), about 40% of Hausa in Sudan carry the West Eurasian haplogroup R1b. The remainder and majority belong to various Sub-Saharan paternal lineages: 15.6% B, 12.5% A and 12.5% E1b1a. A small minority of around 3% are E1b1b clade bearers, a haplogroup which is most common in North Africa and the Horn of Africa.

In terms of overall ancestry, an autosomal DNA study by Tishkoff et al. (2009) found the Hausa to be most closely related to Nilotic populations from Nigeria, Cameroon, central Chad and South Sudan. This suggests that the Hausa and other modern Chadic speaking populations originally spoke Nilo-Saharan languages, before later adopting languages from the Afro-Asiatic family.

"From K = 5-13, all Nilo-Saharan speaking populations from Kenya, Tanzania, southern Sudan, and Chad cluster with west-central Afroasiatic Chadic speaking populations (Fig. S15). These results are consistent with linguistic and archeological data, suggesting a possible common ancestry of Nilo-Saharan speaking populations from an eastern Sudanese homeland within the past ~10,500 years, with subsequent bi-directional migration westward to Lake Chad and southward into modern day southern Sudan, and more recent migration eastward into Kenya and Tanzania ~3,000 ya (giving rise to Southern Nilotic speakers) and westward into Chad ~2,500 ya (giving rise to Central Sudanic speakers) (S62, S65, S67, S74). A proposed migration of proto-Chadic Afroasiatic speakers ~7,000 ya from the central Sahara into the Lake Chad Basin may have caused many western Nilo-Saharans to shift to Chadic languages (S99). Our data suggest that this shift was not accompanied by large amounts of Afroasiatic16 gene flow. Analyses of mtDNA provide evidence for divergence ~8,000 ya of a distinct mtDNA lineage present at high frequency in the Chadic populations and suggest an East African origin for most mtDNA lineages in these populations (S100)."