7,000-Year-Old Mummies Discovered Without Modern Human DNA

Yahoo

10-04-2025

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Two 7,000-year-old mummies from the Takarkori rock shelter in the Sahara have been found to be from a group with a previously unknown ancestry.
DNA analysis of the mummies, which are the remains of female herders from a time when the Sahara was more humid and known as the Green Sahara, did not show the expected Sub-Saharan genes.
The Takarkori individuals are most closely related to other North African peoples who diverged from Sub-Saharan populations long before.
While the Sahara is now a vast expanse of sand where the fight for survival can be brutal, there was a time (however difficult that is to believe) when it was actually green and flourishing.
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.
While the Takarkori apparently had less contact with Neanderthals than the Taforalt, they must have somehow had more contact than other groups in their region. There are also traces of evidence for admixture with farmers from the Levant. Otherwise, the genes of the Takarkori reveal them to have been mostly isolated. They were genetically close to Northwestern African foragers such as the Taforalt but otherwise distinct from Sub-Saharan populations.
This can only mean that there was not much genetic exchange in the Green Sahara during the African Humid Period. It used to be thought that farming practices spread through the region by migrations. Salem's team has another explanation.
'Our findings suggest that pastoralism spread through cultural diffusion into a deeply divergent, isolated North African lineage that had probably been widespread in Northern Africa during the late Pleistocene epoch,' they said in the same study.
It seems that farming spread through the exchange of practices between cultures rather than admixture resulting from migrations. The Takarkori are thought to have inherited their genes from a hunter-gatherer group that was around during a period before animals were domesticated and farming began. Despite being hunter-gatherers, the ancestors of the Takarkori made advances in the manufacture of pottery, baskets, and tools made of wood and bone. They also stayed in one place for longer periods of 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.
Somewhere in the sands of the Sahara and the sands of time, there might be hidden mummies or artifacts waiting to tell us more about what life was like in the desert before it dried out.
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