Science is publishing an Erratum to the Report "Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture throughout the African continent" published online on 8 October 2015. The results of this study were affected by a bioinformatics error on the part of the authors. Their conclusion of a migration into East Africa from Western Eurasia, and more precisely from a source genetically close to the early Neolithic farmers, is not affected. However, the geographic extent of the genetic impact of this migration was overestimated: the Western Eurasian backflow mostly affected East Africa and only a few Sub-Saharan populations. Hence, the title and abstract of the published paper did not accurately represent the geographical extent of the admixture, and both have been corrected. The updated article title and abstract are below, along with the link to the original SciPak entry from October 2015, and to the original paper. The authors acknowledge Pontus Skoglund and David Reich for detecting these problems.
Updated Title and Abstract:
Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture in Eastern Africa
Characterizing genetic diversity in Africa is a crucial step for most analyses reconstructing the evolutionary history of anatomically modern humans. However, historic migrations from Eurasia into Africa have affected many contemporary populations, confounding inferences. Here, we present a 12.5× coverage ancient genome of an Ethiopian male ("Mota") who lived approximately 4,500 years ago. We use this genome to demonstrate that the Eurasian backflow into Africa came from a population closely related to Early Neolithic farmers, who had colonized Europe 4,000 years earlier.
Original paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6262/820
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Journal
Science