7k-year-old skeletons from the green Sahara reveal a mysterious human lineage
24 comments
·April 12, 2025mannyv
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.
owlninja
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?
macintux
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.
owlninja
Thanks to both of you!
marcellus23
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.
begueradj
> "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.
Tuna-Fish
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.
MichaelZuo
But how does that prove there was no animal husbandry in Africa in the prior hundreds of thousands of years?
Tuna-Fish
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.
jjk7
Because there's no evidence of it until after it was developed outside of Africa?
You don't have to prove something that doesn't exist. Find the evidence, and prove it does.
mannyv
"He majored in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it one day." - tom lehrer.
detourdog
I think the development cordage(rope) and woodworking techniques would have a heavy influence on slowing down, noticing the surrounding abundance. Once a location becomes favorable more substantial and long lasting structures could be made.
My question is what was the divide that kept these groups at 50kyo. Something kept them apart.
I hope they get samples from different beings to analyze.
dani__german
it is one logical pathway, but another is to simply move to a new area, rather than develop animal husbandry. Which one seems more likely?
HelloNurse
Both at the same time. If you repeatedly migrate in order to maintain a foraging and hunting lifestyle, you are sufficiently aware of the undependability of foraging and hunting to make large R&D investments in experimental methods of agriculture and animal husbandry.
psunavy03
Depends on how many science points and settlers you have, and where you are on the rest of the tech tree.
contingencies
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"
snxgvas
[flagged]
vfclists
What exactly is "mysterious" about it?
Click-baity title?
Vox_Leone
Please accept my critique to Smithsonian Mag made in good faith: never use the word 'mysterious' [a nod to the magical thinking] in a science context. Really looks like CNN-ish dark pattern. The URL slug has a better word choice:
7000-year-old-skeletons-from-the-green-sahara-reveal-a-previously-unknown-human-lineage-
PaulRobinson
mysterious: adj. difficult or impossible to understand, explain, or identify.
While magic requires mystery, mystery does not require magic and they are not synonyms. It is perfectly valid to state something is a scientific mystery without implying magic is involved in some way.
ziddoap
Would you be able to explain the mystery = magic thinking connection? I've not heard it before. I've obviously heard magic being described as mysterious, but not that mysterious stuff implies magic.
neaden
I don't see the connection between mysterious and magical thinking. It just means it is a mystery and I don't see anything that implies magic about a mystery.
Carrok
The skeletons are mysterious and important.
It's fascinating how genomic analysis continually reshapes our understanding of human migration patterns. This discovery highlights that human evolutionary history is far more complex than our traditional "out of Africa" models suggest, with multiple lineages coexisting and interbreeding throughout prehistoric North Africa.