Vanessa Hayes was co-head of the project which has mapped the genome of Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu an ethnic Bantu along with four bushmen from remote parts of the Kalahari Desert.

The results of the $2.2 million philanthropic-funded project will be handed for free to the scientific community, where it should contribute to future breakthroughs in genetic illness and disease prevention not only within Africa.

The work has also yielded an amazing insight into human diversity, Dr Hayes said, pointing to the nomadic bushmen who have lived in geographic and genetic isolation throughout the ages.

''A bushman and a Bantu, living side by side, are as divergent or different to each other as that Bantu is from ... a European,'' Dr Hayes, from the Children's Cancer Institute Australia based at the University of NSW in Sydney, said.

''And if you took two bushmen from two different linguistic groups, they are as different [genetically] to each other as a European is from an Asian.

''We've always known the continent of Africa is a wealth of diversity ... this is the first time we've had the entire DNA sequence to say, 'Wow, this is the difference'.'' Dr Hayes, who was born in South Africa's Cape Town but now lives in Australia, took two years to complete the work which involved travelling by four-wheel drive with fellow researchers into remote desert.

The project was a collaboration with scientists from the United States' Penn State University, and its results will be published in the journal Nature.

It has added more than 1.3 million new genetic variations to the database of human genome variation which, up until now, was largely made up of DNA data from Europeans. Dr Hayes said the bushmen were the ''oldest known lineage of modern humans'' and their DNA offered new insights into genetic variations that occurred as humans spread across the globe and made the switch from hunter-gatherers to farmers and then modern life.

The research findings were officially unveiled at an event in Namibia's capital city of Windhoek late last night Australian time. AAP