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It has been found that two 7,000-year-old mummies from the Sahara rock shelter in Sahara are of a group of unknown descent so far.
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DNA analysis of mummies, which are the remains of female shepherds from a time when Sahara was more moist and known as the Green Sahara, does not show the expected Sasahari genes.
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Takarkori individuals are most closely linked to other North African peoples, who deviated from the populations of the Sasahara long before.
While the Sahara is now a huge space of sand, where the struggle for survival can be brutal, there was time (no matter how hard it was to believe) when it was actually green and thriving.
Between 14,800 and 5500 years, during what is known as the African wet period, the desert known for being one of the most dry places on Earth, in fact had enough water to support a lifestyle. It was then that the savannah was that the early human populations were established in order to take advantage of favorable agricultural conditions. Among them was a mysterious people who lived in the present southwestern Libya and had to be genetically suggaired-in-end modern analysis, their genes did not reflect this.
Guided by the archaeogenetist Nada Salem of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology of Max Planck, a team of researchers analyzes the genes of two 7,000-year-old naturally preserved mummies of neolithic female shepherds from the Takarori rock shelter. Although the genetic material does not retain well in dry climate, which is why many for the ancient human populations in the Sahara remains a mystery, there was enough fragmented DNA to give insights to their past.
“Most of Takarori’s individuals are derived from an unknown North African genetic line that deviates from African families south from the Sahara around the same time as today’s people outside Africa and remain isolated for most of its existence,” they said in a recent study.
Takarori’s faces are actually close relatives of 15,000-year-old feed from the TaForalt Cave in Morocco. Both families have approximately the same genetic distance from the Sasahari groups that existed during this period, suggesting that there was no very genetic flow between the subsahara and North Africa at the time. TaForalt people also have half the Neanderthal genes of Nefricans, while Takarkori have ten times less. The strange thing is that they still have more Neanderthal DNA than the other Sasahari peoples who were around at the time.
While Takarkori obviously had less contact with the Neanderthals from Taforalt, they must have somehow had more contact than the other groups in their region. There are also traces of evidence of impurity with farmers from the Levant. Otherwise, Takarkori’s genes reveal that they were most insulated. They were genetically close to northwestern African feeds like TaForalt, but otherwise different from the populations of the Sasahari.
This can only mean that there was not much genetic exchange in the Green Sahara during the African wet period. Agricultural practices were thought to be distributed through the region through migrations. The Salem team has another explanation.
“Our discoveries suggest that pastoralism is spread through a cultural distribution in a deeply distinguished, isolated North African line, which was probably widespread in North Africa during the late Pleisto -County Age,” they said in the same study.
Agriculture seems to be distributed by the exchange of practices between crops, not the impurity as a result of migration. It is believed that Takarkori inherited their genes from a group of hunter-gatherers who had been around during the period before the animals were tamed and agriculture began. Although hunters of hunters, Takarkori ancestors have made progress in the production of ceramics, baskets and tools made of wood and bone. They also stayed in one place for longer periods of time.
The reason Takarkori remains isolated is probably related to the variety of environments in the green Sahara. They ranged from lakes and wetlands to forests to lawns, savannah and even mountains. Such differences in habitats were barriers to the interaction between human populations.
Somewhere in the sands of the Sahara and the sands of time, there may be hidden mummies or artifacts waiting to tell us more about what life in the desert is before it dries.
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