Archbishop Tutu is part Bushman, DNA study reveals

Scientists said yesterday they had sequenced the genome of Bushmen, the longest-surviving lineage of modern humans, expanding our understanding of genetic diversity and inherited disease.

Comparison of DNA provided by a Bushman elder and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu showed that Tutu is partly of Bushman heritage, they added.

The 78-year-old Nobel winner voiced "astonishment and delight" at the news, said a researcher.

Bushmen is the collective term for linguistically-distinct groups of hunter-gatherers who inhabit the Kalahari Desert, which straddles parts of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.

They are the oldest known continuous community of modern Homo sapiens, having lived in this sparsely-populated region for some 27,000 years, anthropologists believe.

The genomes substantially widen knowledge about humanity's book of life, revealing our species to be more genetically diverse than thought, the investigators said.

"We have been able to add an enormous amount of information to the genome database," said Vanessa Hayes, a cancer specialist at the University of New South Wales, Australia and co-leader of the study.

"There are 1.3 million genetic variants that had never been reported before," she said by phone from Namibia in an interview.

Dr Hayes said the findings - appearing in the journal Nature today - will help balance a "eurocentric" focus in genomics.

"As a result of this project, southern Africans will immediately be included in genome-wide association studies, increasing our ability to examine regionally significant diseases," she said.