Pleistocene North African genomes link Near Eastern and sub-Saharan African human populations

Abstract

North Africa is a key region for understanding human history, but the genetic history of its people is largely unknown. We present genomic data from seven 15,000-year-old modern humans, attributed to the Iberomaurusian culture, from Morocco. We find a genetic affinity with early Holocene Near Easterners, best represented by Levantine Natufians, suggesting a pre-agricultural connection between Africa and the Near East. We do not find evidence for gene flow from Paleolithic Europeans to Late Pleistocene North Africans. The Taforalt individuals derive one-third of their ancestry from sub-Saharan Africans, best approximated by a mixture of genetic components preserved in present-day West and East Africans. Thus, we provide direct evidence for genetic interactions between modern humans across Africa and Eurasia in the Pleistocene.

Aspects of human physical and behavioural evolution during the last 1 million years

“…Unfortunately, scientists have not yet been able to recover aDNA from African fossils older than about ~15 ka (Van de Loosdrecht et al ., ), nor from H. sapiens fossils older than about 45 ka in Eurasia. However, thousands of modern human genomes have now been sequenced, and these allow extrapolations about the evolutionary history of our species, supported by a growing number of genomes from Eurasian fossils younger than 45 ka.…”

“…The presence of a succeeding population of modern humans may be indicated by teeth dated to~46 ka (Sutikna et al, 2016b). Moreover, additional excavations at open-air sites in the So'a Basin on Flores have revealed archaeology stretching back to at least 1 million years, and the presence of a small fragmentary jawbone and isolated teeth at~700 ka, perhaps documenting an ancestral population for H. floresiensis (Brumm et al, 2010;Brumm et al, 2016;van den Bergh et al, 2016).…”

The evolutionary history of human populations in Europe

“…Western European hunter-gatherers (WHG), first described in three sites of western Europe [16][17][18][19] are now known to also have lived in southeastern Europe [20,21] WHG-like ancestry may represent a partial source of ancestry of populations bordering Europe, for example in Anatolia whose early farmers ~8kya are genetically closer to WHG than other Near Eastern populations are [24], or in the Atlantic where pre-colonial Guanche inhabitants of the Canary Islands had some European hunter-gatherer affinity in addition to their mainly North African origin [25]. WHG did not, however, appear to make any quantifiable genetic contribution to the Upper Paleolithic inhabitants of geographically proximate Morocco ~15kya in North Africa [26].…”

International workshop on human occupations of the Nile Valley and neighboring regions between 75,000 and 15,000 years ago

“…Central to this issue may be the contribution of ancient DNA. The “oldest” nuclear DNA evidence from Africa comes from Grotte des Pigeons, near Taforalt in Morocco, and one of its implications is that a Natufian‐related ancestral population may have been widespread across North Africa and the Near East, associated with microlithic‐backed bladelet technologies . Comparing data between the Nile Valley archeological record and adjacent regions is essential in testing the dispersal hypotheses and their archeological visibility, but such attempts remain scarce.…”