It is less than a decade since scientists developed swift and efficient methods of extracting and analysing ancient DNA from human remains (for which Svante Pääbo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2022) and yet scarcely a day goes by without some new breakthrough in our understanding of the past thanks to studies based on ancient genomes. One recent example is the report, published in Nature (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06166-6), concerned with the introduction of agriculture to North Africa, settling debates about how and when it occurred. A research team from Sweden, Spain, and Morocco found a remarkable population continuity in north-west Africa until some 7,500 years ago, indicative of a group of local foragers with an ancestry dating back many thousands of years.
Two new genomes were detected at that point, both within a thousand years of each other. The first migrants to introduce a farming lifestyle came from the northern Mediterranean coast. Within a few hundred years, local foragers started to include cultivation in their own lifestyle, though the two groups remained separate, living side by side, for at least another century after that. Around 6,300 years ago, a further new genetic strain appeared in the human remains, brought by migrants from the Levant. All three ancestries then blended during the Late Neolithic.
Dr Rafael Martínez Sánchez from the University of Córdoba, Spain, commented that the genomic data confirms what ceramic decoration was already pointing to: ‘a unidirectional diffusion from the Iberian coast to the Tingitan Peninsula, around 7,500 years ago’. ‘Filling these key chronological gaps in the Maghreb is crucial to understanding how the different subsistence strategies were acquired in this region’, said Dr Youssef Bokbot from the Institut National des Sciences de l’Archéologie et du Patrimoine in Morocco.
Lascaux IV