The once lush and green Sahara Desert was also home to mystical human pedigrees, 14,500 to 5,000 years ago, and new research has been discovered.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, detailed in a study published in Nature this week, findings from the DNA of two naturally mummified individuals 7,000 years ago were excavated from the Takalkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya.
Humans lived in “the humid age of Africa,” when the Sahara desert was green and dotted with lakes and streams. Humans live in the area, and it was common for pastoralism or herds to care for them, researchers said.
The motivation transformed the once lush oasis into the Sahara desert known today as the region gradually became increasingly drier.
Using genomic analysis, researchers found that North African lineages diverged from the sub-Saharan African population around the same time as modern human lineages that spread outside of Africa around 50,000 years ago.
Takarkori Mummies had its own unique, isolated lineage.
The mummies shared close genetic ties with 15,000-year-old foraging people who lived during the ice age in Tafort Caves in Morocco. Researchers also tracked the ancestors of Maimy’s Neandertals and found that they had 10 times less Neandertal DNA than people outside of Africa, but more than modern sub-Saharan Africans.
“Our findings suggest that although the early North African populations were largely isolated, they received traces of neandertial DNA due to gene flow from outside Africa,” said Johannes Kraus, director of the Max Planck Institute, in a statement.
The findings also revealed that the “Green Sahara” was not as widely used in transition as previously thought, researchers said. In other words, instead of mixing different groups during large movements, the groups likely interacted in rare cases, and did so through cultural interchanges.
“Our research challenges previous assumptions about the history of the population in North Africa and highlights the existence of long-term, deeply rooted genetic lines,” said Nada Salem, the first author and researcher of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “The findings reveal how idyllicism spreads across the green Sahara, not through cultural exchanges, rather than on a large scale.”
