Simone Mulazzani
A skeleton found in Tunisia proves contact between European and African hunter-gatherers
Thousands of years before Odysseus crossed the “dark sea” in Homer’s epic poem, Odyssey, while the stone-age hunters were island to Island to Africa through the Mediterranean, in wood canoes.
A new published in Nature suggests that ancient European hunters may have crossed the Mediterranean in the north of Africa about 8500 years agomarking the beginning of contact between populations that were thought to be isolated.
The investigation analyzed ancient DNA of remains found in East Magrebe, a region that covers Tunisia and Northeast of Algeria.
The results indicate that at least one individual in this area had about 6% of his DNA from European hunter-gatherers. This is the first definitive genetic proof of interaction between the first European and North African populations.
“For several decades, some biological anthropologists have speculated that European and North Africa hunters-gatters had had contactbased on skeletal traits, ”he said Ron Pinhasievolutionary anthropologist at the University of Vienna and co-author of the study.
“At the time, this theory seemed excessively speculative.
The Stone Age, which started about 3 million years agoended approximately 5000 years ago in some regions, with the appearance of metal tools and the first civilizations.
During this period, hunters-gatherers, both in Europe and in North Africa, gradually passed to agriculture. While previous studies focused on the genetic history of Western Maghreb (present -day Morocco), little was known about the transition from Eastern Maghreb to Agriculture, explains the.
David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School, another co-author of the study, noted that the initial history of North Africa remained largely unexplored. “There has not been much history from North Africa,” Reich told Nature News. “It was a huge hole”.
Previous studies have revealed that European farmers, genetically distinct from hunters-lector, contributed significantly to Western Maghreb populations-up to 80% in some cases, probably due to migration through the Gibraltar Strait about 7000 years ago.
However, the new study found that the populations of East Maghreb had much less ancestry of European farmers – only about 20% – suggesting that were more isolated genetically.
These findings suggest that the early human beings of East Magreb have maintained their traditions of hunter-gatherers much longer than its western counterparts, delaying the adoption of agriculture to about 1000 AC
