© Evan Leach
Members of a village in Cameroon who are Pygmies.
Members of a village in Cameroon who are Pygmies.
Researchers analyzed the genomes, the "building code" that directs how an organism is put together, of Western African Pygmies in Cameroon, who average 4 feet, 11 inches tall, and compared them to their neighboring relatives, the Bantus, who average 5 feet, 6 inches, to see whether these differences were genetic or a factor of their environment.
"There's been a longstanding debate about why Pygmies are so short and whether it is an adaptation to living in a tropical environment," study researcher Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania said in a statement. "Our findings are telling us that the genetic basis of complex traits like height may be very different in globally diverse populations."
Short population
© Evan Leach
Study researcher Alain Froment, of the Museum of Man in France, in the striped shirt with a group of Pygmies.
Study researcher Alain Froment, of the Museum of Man in France, in the striped shirt with a group of Pygmies.
Some Pygmy women have given birth to half-Bantu babies, which integrates Bantu genes into the Pygmy population, but offspring of male Pygmy and female Bantu are rare, so the Bantus don't have many Pygmy genes.
The researchers analyzed the genomes of 67 Pygmies and 58 Bantus for changes that would provide information about an individual's ancestry.
These changes are small, nonharmful misspellings in the code (the chemical bases A, C, T and G) that makes up the genome. For example, a Bantu might have an A where a Pygmy has a T.
By analyzing large numbers of these changes, researchers can tell how much of an individual's genome is Bantu and how much is Pygmy.
