Green Sahara Mummies Reveal a People Who Stood Apart 

The Sahara is the largest desert in the world, a vast arid wilderness stretching across north Africa. For millennia it has been a near insurmountable barrier separating the Mediterranean from the rest of the African continent. 

The ancient Egyptians, clustering along the shores of the Nile, depended on the desert for their defense. For them the lands were divided into the black, life-giving soils watered by their sacred river, and the endless red hell which lay beyond.

But the deserts of north Africa were not always there. 7,000 years ago, this was a verdant landscape, teeming with life. Humans lived here, and now a new study has uncovered exactly who these people of the “Green Sahara” were.

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The research, published in Nature, focuses on the ancient rock shelter of Takarkori in the mountains of southwestern Libya. Extremely inaccessible even today and surrounded by sand, this place was once very different.

Between 14,500 and 5,000 years ago during what is known as the “African Humid Period” this was a lush, forested area with rivers, lakes, and large animals. People also lived here, an isolated community of livestock farmers separate from the rest of the world. The remains of the people and their community have been preserved by the subsequent desiccated environment.

Usually such hot environments with wild temperature swings between day and night would quickly destroy DNA traces. However the new research concentrates on two skeletal mummies in an exceptional state of preservation, and the team have been able to extract legible DNA and map the entire genome of these people. 

The results are surprising: it was known the pastoralists of Takarkori were isolated, but their genes reveal for just now long they lived separated from the rest of the world. For tens of thousands of years these people lived an isolated existence among their goats and sheep.

This is interesting. It had been theorized that the era of a Green Sahara would have turned the area around Takarkori into a corridor for migration out of the heart of Africa into the lands to the north. This does not seem to be the case: although the terrain would have been much easier to traverse than it is today, these people were not a part of that great human expansion.

How did they learn to farm, then? They are not genetically linked to the humans of the Near East, where farming was first innovated. The best guess for now is that they learned the techniques from the people with whom they traded, via cultural exchange. Remains of pottery found at Takarkori and their cave paintings show these people were isolated genetically, but not culturally.

However the lack of evidence of inbreeding suggests that these isolated people were also not small in number. There must have been a significant population here, trading with their neighbors but otherwise remaining isolated for millennia.

Where did they come from? That, in truth, is the final mystery: these people are not closely linked to any of the other populations in the ancient world. They are from a previously unknown ancient African lineage. There is some Neanderthal in the mix, more than sub-Saharan Africans yet ten times less than the Levantine farmers who must have taught them to tend their livestock.

We have to reach far back into the Pleistocene, more than 11,000 years ago, in our search for the origins of these new people. They came from places unknown, lived in splendid isolation for longer than all of human history, and then died in this place, forgotten until now.

Header Image: The DNA came from mummies at Takarkori during the “Green Sahara” period. Source: Museum for Prehistory and Early History / CC BY-SA 4.0.