The discovery is as fascinating as it is disconcerting. Two naturally preserved mummies, exhumed from a rock shelter called Takarkori and located in the Libyan Sahara, do not belong to any genetic lineage known in current humans, reports the Popular Mechanics online media. Coming from a Neolithic population of shepherds, these two women lived in a time called the African wet period, when the Sahara was green, covered with lakes, wood and meadows.
Yet the DNA of these two mummified bodies revealed something extraordinary. He does not show any trace of the sub -Saharan genes expected by the researchers, based on the previous excavations and on the current populations of the region. Surprisingly, genetic equipment would be associated with a North African line hitherto unknown and remained isolated during most of its existence.
Led by the archaeogenetician Nada Salem of the Max-Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig in Germany, the study reveals that these individuals shared more with hunters of the Taforalt cave, in Morocco, than with the sub-Saharan peoples. Although the arid climate does not keep genetic material well enough, the found DNA also indicates a very low presence of Neanderthal genes.
A forgotten lineage
Who are these women? How did their community live, Takarkori? They would in fact be the descendants of a group of hunter-gatherers 15,000 years old and already very inventive. Their ancestors mastered the manufacture of pottery, baskets and wood or bone tools, and this community continued by remaining isolated, which would explain the singularities of discovered DNA.
Their genetic isolation would be explained by the diversity of the landscapes of the green Sahara: lakes, savannas or mountains. All these natural barriers limited the interaction between the populations. Contrary to popular belief, knowledge -related knowledge or agriculture did not circulate through migration, but rather thanks to the exchanges of practices between different cultures.
“Our results suggest that pastoralism has spread by cultural dissemination in a deeply divergent and isolated North African line, which had probably been widespread in North Africa during the end of the Pleistocene”explain scientists in a study published in Nature.
Before the Sahara dried up, some of its regions were the scene of isolated developments. Perhaps the discovery of other mummies, still buried under the desert, will one day come to tell us more about these forgotten populations.
