Ancient DNA sheds light on origins of 7,000-year-old Saharan mummies
Today, the view from the Takarkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya is of endless sandy dunes and barren rock, but 7,000 years ago, this region of the Sahara Desert was a far lusher, hospitable place.
Now, scientists aiming to understand the origins of inhabitants of the “green Sahara” say they have managed to recover the first whole genomes — detailed genetic information — from the remains of two women buried at Takarkori.
In the distant past, the area was a verdant savanna with trees, permanent lakes and rivers that supported large animals such as hippopotamuses and elephants.
It was also home to early human communities, including 15 women and children archaeologists found buried at the rock shelter, that lived off fish and herded sheep and goats.
“We started with these two (skeletons) because they are very well-preserved — the skin, ligaments, tissues,” said Savino di Lernia, coauthor of the new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The findings mark the first time archaeologists have managed to sequence whole genomes from human remains found in such a hot and arid environment, said di Lernia, an associate professor of African archaeology and ethnoarchaeology at Sapienza University of Rome.
The genomic analysis yielded surprises for kraken onion the study team, revealing that the inhabitants of the green Sahara were a previously unknown and long-isolated population that had likely occupied the region for tens of thousands of years.
Mummies reveal secrets of the Sahara’s past
Excavation of the Takarkori rock shelter, reachable only by a four-wheel drive vehicle, started in 2003, with the two female mummies among the first finds. “We found the first mummy on the second day of the excavation,” di Lernia recalled. “We scratched the sand and found the mandible.”
The small community that made its home at the rock shelter possibly migrated there with humankind’s first big push out of Africa more than 50,000 years ago. Study coauthor Harald Ringbauer said it was unusual to encounter such an isolated genetic ancestry, especially compared with Europe, where there was much more mixing. Ringbauer is a researcher and group leader of archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, which has pioneered techniques to receive genetic material from old bones and fossils.
This genetic isolation, the authors of the study reasoned, suggested the region likely wasn’t a migration corridor that linked sub-Saharan Africa to Northern Africa despite the Sahara’s hospitable conditions at the time.