Ancient mummies rewrite human history with “ghost” lineage discovery

 In a remote rock shelter in southwestern Libya’s Saharan desert, two 7,000-year-old mummies have revealed the existence of a previously unknown human lineage, challenging long-held assumptions about ancient migrations and genetic diversity. Analyzed by researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute and the Sapienza University of Rome, the remains belong to a group that split from other Africans 50,000 years ago and remained genetically isolated for millennia. Their minimal Neanderthal DNA and distinct ancestry suggest a c

The two mummified individuals, buried in Takarkori rock shelter, were female pastoralists who lived during the climatic peak of the “Green Sahara,” a 10,000-year era when the desert teemed with lakes, grasslands and abundant wildlife. Despite the Sahara’s fertile past, the research team found that these individuals shared no detectable genetic ties to sub-Saharan Africans or migrating populations from the Middle East or Europe. Instead, their DNA closely aligned with Ice Age hunters from Morocco, forming a lineage that had diverged from all other Africans 50,000 years prior.

“This was a population that probably didn’t even realize how isolated they were,” said study co-author Nada Salem, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The team’s sequencing of the mummies’ full genomes, published in Nature, exposed a genetic group that researchers had only previously detected as faint “ghost” signals in modern North Africans.

omplex evolutionary story in a once-lush Sahara — a finding with profound implications for understanding how early humans spread knowledge without intermingling...<<<Read More>>>...