This ancient people lived in the Sahara when it was a much more welcoming environment:
Between 14,800 and 5,500 years ago, during what is known as the African Humid Period, the desert known for being one of the driest places on Earth actually had enough water to support a way of life. Back then, it was a savannah that early human populations settled in to take advantage of the favorable farming conditions. Among them was a mysterious people who lived in what is now southwestern Libya and should have been genetically Sub-Saharan—except, upon a modern analysis, their genes didn't reflect that.
Led by archaeogeneticist Nada Salem from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a team of researchers analyzed the genes of two 7,000-year-old naturally preserved mummies of Neolithic female herders from the Takarkori rock shelter. Though genetic material does not preserve well in arid climates, which is why much about ancient human populations in the Sahara remains a mystery, there was enough fragmented DNA to give insights into their past.
"The majority of Takarkori individuals' ancestry stems from a previously unknown North African genetic lineage that diverged from sub-Saharan African lineages around the same time as present-day humans outside Africa and remained isolated throughout most of its existence," they said in a study recently published in Nature.
The Takarkori individuals are actually close relatives of 15,000-year-old foragers from Taforalt Cave in Morocco. Both lineages have about the same genetic distance from Sub-Saharan groups that existed during that period, which suggests that there was not much gene flow between Sub-Saharan and Northen Africa at the time. The Taforalt people also have half the Neanderthal genes of non-Africans, while the Takarkori have ten times less. What is strange is that they still have more Neanderthal DNA than other sub-Saharan peoples who were around at the time.
[...] The reason the Takarkori stayed isolated probably has to do with the diversity of environments in the Green Sahara. These ranged from lakes and wetlands to woodlands to grasslands, savannas and even mountains. Such differences in habitats were barriers to interaction between human populations.
Journal Reference: Salem, N., van de Loosdrecht, M.S., Sümer, A.P. et al. Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage. Nature 641, 144–150 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08793-7
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 23, @06:56PM (13 children)
Somehow, that seems so very wrong. They share no DNA with modern humans? OK then, explain what they evolved from. They didn't evolve from monkeys/apes/simian? They evolved from reptiles or something? Or they are totally alien from earth, imported by 'The Galaxians' for whatever reason the Galaxians do things.
It's best to click the DOI link, and read the paper. Forget about the title of this silly article, it's completely inaccurate. These people WERE people, they were HUMAN, though perhaps not entirely "modern human".
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08793-7 [nature.com]
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23, @07:59PM (11 children)
Yes, headline is garbage I don't know why you're modded down. Humans in Africa at the time were homo sapiens, modern humans. Neanderthals were not modern humans but could breed with us. I think the headline author is confused over what a "lineage" is vs. a species or subspecies.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23, @08:29PM (9 children)
ALL members of the genus homo are humans. Neanderthals were human.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday September 23, @08:43PM (8 children)
There's no good definition of "species", much less of "human". I tend to consider both Neanderthals and Denisovians as humans, but that's my usage, not standard.
Please note: It's only because the records are incomplete that we can reasonably separate *any* existing species from it's ancestors. In actual fact the transition was always a gradient (though possibly a geographically restricted one). As we get more complete records, the divisions become more arbitrary. Still, they are useful as markers for classifiers. The average Neanderthal probably looked quite a bit different from the average Cro-Magnon.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Tuesday September 23, @09:27PM (7 children)
"There's no good definition of "species", much less of "human". "
Classic libtard. Probably can't define 'woman' either. /s
(god I hope that /s wasn't necessary... but here we are. Anyone that thinks they CAN provide a good definition of a woman is wrong, even setting gender identity aside, the definition of a woman as an adult female human is nothing but uncertainty. Not only is "human" itself difficult to define as parent poster mentioned, but so is the definition of 'adult' and 'female'. Adult for example might be defined as having reached sexual maturity and capable of reproduction - so if you are sterile you can't reach adulthood? That can't right, and other definitions are equally problematic. And male/female, likewise is wholly unable to address a variety of intersex conditions, for an example where it fails spectacularly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46%2CXX/46%2CXY [wikipedia.org]
The whole thing is a house of cards built on shifting sands, and any definition is pretty arbitrary, and trying to cling to certainty is just clinging to ignorance.)
But yeah, that headline was nonsense, we share some DNA with bananas, so the likelihood we don't share any DNA with some prehistoric human population is extremely implausible. I'm assuming they're trying to say that this population died out and we have no DNA inherited specifically from it, although we share common ancestors (and therefore DNA) with the population.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23, @10:17PM
And yet here we are.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday September 24, @02:08AM (3 children)
Some people are more bananas than others.
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(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Wednesday September 24, @07:56AM (2 children)
If you look at mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited almost exclusively from the mother, except for some modern assisted fertilisation techniques, you get a branching tree that records 'genetic drift'. By making some assumptions about how quickly changes accumulate over time, you get an idea about how far back in time an ancestral sample is.
If you look at nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents, you can identify a set of markers that get mixed thoroughly in a population. If you have two populations with dissimilar sets of markers, you can see that there is no mixing.
So the mitochondrial DNA tells you how old a sample is, and the nuclear DNA markers tell you what population the individual was a member of.
So what we have here is some genetic material that tells you that there was a group of people in North Africa who were not reproductively mixing with other groups over a long period, and they never re-integrated into the larger population of humans - they 'died out'. So they were human: they just didn't mix with other groups of humans.
Left long enough, they might have ended up as a different species where both the males and females could not produce offspring when fertilisation with humans was attempted (mutually infertile). But there's no suggestion they were another species, just simply an isolated group.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, @01:46PM (1 child)
That's some faggy shit, bro.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday September 24, @02:23PM
GP is bananas. Parent is more of a plantain.
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(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday September 24, @05:26AM (1 child)
The fact that some edge cases don't fit the definition doesn't make the definition invalid. We should acknowledge the inaccuracy with an asterisk and either move on or refine the definition. The purpose of a definition is to solidify understanding; claiming that definitions are impossible or worthless impedes or destroys understanding
In the case of male/female, refusal to accept a valid distinction and pushing the issue into belligerent politics has done nobody any good.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday September 25, @12:54AM
Actually, I think the problem is with the idea implicit in the word "definition". It's always possible to find a useful centroid, but putting a fence around the edge is often impossible.
Actually, I guess what you need is both a centroid and a distance metric. There are lots of things that grade into one another.
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(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 24, @01:53AM
We need to define "modern human". If they don't come with at least a USB-C third gen receptacle, they aren't really modern. USB-A was for dinosaurs. Surely there must be some standard on the placement of the receptacle . . .
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Wednesday September 24, @12:16AM
I think we'll have to keep an eye on popularmechanics.com as a source for articles.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday September 23, @07:45PM (1 child)
This should be a whole season of material for Giorgio Tsoukalos over at Ancient Alien ... oh ... not aliens ... well that never stopped them before.