section_path: Homo sapiens/Holocene migrations/Sub-Saharan Africa
section_name: Sub-Saharan Africa
paragraph_text: Sub-Saharan Africa
  
  West-Eurasian back-migrations started in the early Holocene or already earlier in the Paleolithic period (30-15kya), followed by pre-Neolithic and Neolithic migration events from the Middle East, mostly affecting Northern Africa, the Horn of Africa, and wider regions of the Sahel zone and East Africa.
  
  The Nilotic peoples are thought to be derived from an earlier undifferentiated Eastern Sudanic unity by the 3rd millennium BCE. The development of the Proto-Nilotes as a group may have been connected with their domestication of livestock. The Eastern Sudanic unity must have been considerably earlier still, perhaps around the 5th millennium BCE (while the proposed Nilo-Saharan unity would date to the Upper Paleolithic about 15kya). The original locus of the early Nilotic speakers was presumably east of the Nile in what is now South Sudan. The Proto-Nilotes of the 3rd millennium BCE were pastoralists, while their neighbors, the Proto- Central Sudanic peoples, were mostly agriculturalists.
  
  The Niger-Congo phylum is thought to have emerged around 6,000 years ago in West or Central Africa. Its expansion may have been associated with the expansion of Sahel agriculture in the African Neolithic period, following the desiccation of the Sahara in c. 3900 BCE. The Bantu expansion has spread the Bantu languages to Central, Eastern and Southern Africa, partly replacing the indigenous populations of these regions, including the African Pygmies, Hadza people and San people. Beginning about 3,000 years ago, it reached South Africaabout 1,700 years ago.
  
  Some evidence (including a 2016 study by Busby et al.) suggests admixture from ancient and recent migrations from Eurasia into parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Another study (Ramsay et al. 2018) also shows evidence that ancient Eurasians migrated into Africa and that Eurasian admixture in modern Sub-Saharan Africans ranges from 0% to 50%, varying by region and generally higher in the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel zone, and found to a lesser degree in certain parts of Western Africa, and Southern Africa (excluding recent immigrants).