7k-year-old skeletons from the green Sahara reveal a mysterious human lineage
smithsonianmag.com96 points by pseudolus 8 days ago
96 points by pseudolus 8 days ago
What's interesting is that the population remained isolated for tens of thousands of years.
Generally speaking, people move around and are promiscuous. Staying isolated for that long implies a physical barrier, because cultures generally don't survive for 40,000 years. But an isolated population means genetic issues - but if the population is big then they should have spread at least somewhat.
I’ve been enjoying a podcast called Our Prehistory. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, the first few episodes get really into this, and it’s definitely sunk some misconceptions I had about evolution (that other species groups lived among the Homo Sapiens), why they died out, more branches than originally thought etc.
Paper @ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08793-7
"Our admixture dating analysis points to events far back in time, suggesting a more heterogeneous spread of pastoralism and food production in the Sahara compared to Morocco and East Africa"
Curious how this post says '5 Hours ago' but if you search or click 'smithsonianmag.com' up there, you see this as a post that says 3 days ago?
The moderators keep an eye out for interesting content that is ignored on submission, and put the posts back into a queue to be published again.
The admins do this sometimes, it's called the "second-chance pool" or something like that. They'll look at stories from the past few days that deserved more attention than they got, and essentially re-submit them.
oh my god they were roommates
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What exactly is "mysterious" about it?
Click-baity title?
> "despite practicing animal husbandry—a cultural innovation that originated outside Africa"
Animal husbandry was a response to unproductive hunting. And since desertification - hence unproductive hunting- started long time ago in Africa, it makes sense that animal husbandry started there too before it appeared elsewhere.
Animal husbandry did not start in Africa, though. It started in the fertile crescent and spread into Africa. This is very well attested in archaeological finds, and in the fact that the relevant animals were domesticated first there.
The surprising news is that the spread of animal husbandry didn't seem to accompany the spread of human genes -- the subsistence strategy was adopted by learning, not by people moving.
I don't think this is very shocking because the same thing seems to have happened elsewhere. While agriculture mostly spread by people moving, the culture that developed into all the pastoral cultures of the Eurasian steppe seem to have been hunter-gatherers living in close proximity to farmers.
But how does that prove there was no animal husbandry in Africa in the prior hundreds of thousands of years?
Animal husbandry leaves behind a lot of evidence, starting from different distributions of animal ages and sexes found in bones in refuse pits, to genetic evidence of artificial selection.
This evidence is found everywhere. But it's dateable, and you can find the oldest instances of it in the fertile crescent.
Do you really need me to remind you that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?
Maybe “burden of proof” is a phrase to get re-acquainted with? Why do you think an apparently unsubstantiated alternative should be considered despite the archeological record?
Did any of you guys read the article? In the first few paragraphs:
"They’ve successfully analyzed the DNA of two naturally mummified livestock herders who died roughly 7,000 years ago in present-day Libya, which was part of what’s known as the “green Sahara.”
The article says they were practising animal husbandry - I'm guessing they have evidence for that!
So the question is not whether they did it, but whether they started doing it themselves or were taught it by others.
Who said I wanted to prove it did happen?
You cannot prove it didn’t happen, and I also don’t think it was that likely. Both can be true.
I also can't show conclusive evidence that there wasn't a continent of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic 10k years ago that mysteriously disappeared without a trace. Yet if someone enters a conversation about geography with me and inquiries about Atlantis I'm probably going to tell them that it never existed without bothering to wrap that statement in multiple layers of clarification about the evidence and probability estimates and highly unlikely contingencies.
We can't prove that there wasn't some isolated genius who engaged in animal husbandry in Africa before everyone else but was ignored by the rest of his tribe or whatever. But we have managed to place some fairly low upper bound on how much of that could have been happening. At some point it is reasonable to conclude that your typical society in that time and place didn't have access to it.