Two mummies reveal a human lineage lived in isolation in the Green Sahara 7,000 years ago

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2025-04-03/two-mummies-reveal-a-human-lineage-lived-in-isolation-in-the-green-sahara-7000-years-ago.html

Two mummies reveal a human lineage lived in isolation in the Green Sahara 7,000 years ago

DNA explains the enigma of the culture that painted swimmers and hippos in the middle of the desert thousands of years ago

NUÑO DOMÍNGUEZ
APR 03, 2025 - 10:46 EDT

Almost 100 years ago, Hungarian explorer Lászlo Almásy was crossing the Sahara Desert when he came across something inexplicable in a cave. On the rock walls, he saw human figures painted thousands of years earlier that seemed to be swimming peacefully in the middle of the desert. Some thought they represented corpses, even souls floating in the waters of Nun, the primordial ocean of Egyptian culture. Almásy suggested that they were in fact simply people swimming, because the Sahara wasn’t always a desert.

Now, the corpses of two adult women who died some 7,000 years ago in what is now southern Libya have provided the first known genetic data on the mysterious inhabitants of the so-called Green Sahara. The two corpses were naturally mummified thanks to the aridity and high temperatures in the region, which allowed DNA to be extracted from their tooth roots and some of their bones. The results, published on Wednesday in Nature, show that these people belonged to a previously unknown branch of the human family that survived in isolation for thousands of years thanks to a radical transformation of the landscape.

Fourteen thousand years ago, the Ice Age ended, and monsoon rains turned all of Africa green. The desert transformed into a savanna covered with grasses, trees, lakes, and rivers inhabited by giraffes, hippopotamuses, and other animals, as well as groups of humans who survived by hunting and gathering. This is the landscape depicted in the famous rock paintings in the Tadrart Acacus Mountains of Libya, which are up to 12,000 years old. In this same area is Takarkori, a rock shelter where 15 bodies have been found, including those of the two women analyzed, along with baskets woven from riparian grasses, characteristic of wetlands.

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About 5,000 years ago, the shift in the Earth’s rotational axis and the withdrawal of monsoon rains turned the Sahara back into a desert. This caused an exodus of pastoralist peoples to other parts of Africa and may have been the origin of Egyptian civilization. The Takarkori lineage, such as it was, became extinct forever. But some of its DNA is still present in North African populations.

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