Green Oasis: Over a time known as the African humid period, it is thought that Sahara was a succulent savanna.Credit: Heinrich Carlson/Getty
We always know the Sahara Desert that we know today that there is no dry, inhuman landscape. 14,500 and 5,000 years ago, the region was unfamiliar, turning into a succulent savanna by an unusually wet interval, called the African humid period. People wandered in this green scenario for thousands of years, before it lost to the sand again.
Vikings to Beethowen: What your DNA says about your ancient relatives
Ancient DNA was extracted from two women, who now died in Libya about 7,000 years ago, now helping researchers to rebuild the origin of these early co -orders. Women’s DNA Profile, described in a study published on 2 April Nature1Purna Saharan represents the genome before the African humid period – and it suggests that people were remarkably different from other African population.
“Pragithethas of North Africa is a large puzzle, and we have only a few pieces available,” Spain’s San Christobal says Rosa Freigl, a geneticist at La Laguna University, who was not involved in research. She says that this work is “an important contribution to the peliogenomics of North Africa”.
Precious genome
It is difficult for ancient genome from North Africa. Almost all palogenetic functions are concentrated in Europe and Asia. The ancient DNA is particularly rare in the Sahara, where high temperatures and strong ultraviolet lights degrad the genetic material in rapid residues.
Tarkori Rock Shelter in Libya, where the remains were detected.Credit: University of Rom La Sapninja
This is why Nada Salem, an archaeologist of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leapzig, Germany, is important to detect the sites protected from the elements.
One such site is the Takercory Rock Shelter in South -West Libya. Between 2003 and 2007, archaeologists highlighted the remains of 15 people, who were buried between 8,900 to 4,800 years ago. Two of the dead bodies – both belong to women, who lived 7,000 to 6,000 years ago – naturally mummy.
Archaeological evidence on the site suggested that Takarkori women were of a group of flocks, which appeared in the region about 8,000 years ago. It marked a major infection in the way of life of early coasts, which were first all hunters. Some researchers have suggested that Saharan learned to inter -caste with people who were migrating from Levant to North Africa.
To test it, Salem and their colleagues sequentially sequenced the Tarkori genome and compared DNA to about 800 modern humans and 117 ancient genomes around Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East. The team found that Tarkarkori women had only small marks of the Levant dynasty – suggesting that there was any mutual action long before the arrival of herring in the region.
What is more, the analysis struggles to connect these early coasts to another ancient group. “It was surprised to us. How is this that this dynasty has not spread to East or West or South?” Salem says.
