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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.”
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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.

Past analyses of cave paintings and animal remains found at archaeological sites across the Sahara have suggested its inhabitants were pastoralists who herded sheep, goats or cattle, prompting some researchers to hypothesize the herders spread from the Near East where farming originated.

However, such migration was unlikely, given the genetic isolation of the Takarkori group, the authors of the new report suggested. Instead, the study team hypothesized, pastoralism was adopted via a process of cultural exchange, such as interaction with other groups that already raised domesticated animals.

“We know now that they were isolated in terms of genetics, but not in cultural terms. There’s a lot of networks that we know from several parts of the continent, because we have pottery coming from sub-Saharan Africa. We have pottery coming from the Nile Valley and the like,” di Lernia said.

“They had this kind of lineage, which is quite ancestral, (which) points to some kind of Pleistocene legacy, which needs to be explored,” he said, referring to the time period that came to an end around 11,000 years ago before the current Holocene Epoch.