SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submission Preview
Scientists Found 7,000-Year-Old Mummies in the Desert That Don’t Share DNA With Modern Humans
This ancient people lived in the Sahara when it was a much more welcoming environment [popularmechanics.com]:
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 [popularmechanics.com] 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 [nature.com].
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 [popularmechanics.com] 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 [popularmechanics.com] 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 [doi.org]
