Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants from Iberia and Levant

Nature ^ | June 7, 2023 | (see list)

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The Early Neolithic site of KTG, located on the North African Mediterranean coast near the Gibraltar strait (Fig. 1a), predates and partly overlaps in time with IAM2 (Table 1). At KTG a full Neolithic assemblage is found, including a diversity of cultivated cereals, domestic mammals and cardial ceramics. In contrast to the people at IAM, those at KTG are genetically similar to European Early Neolithic populations...

Overall, the genetic patterns of local interaction between different groups in northwestern Africa are comparable to those found in Europe: farmers assimilated local foragers' ancestry in a unidirectional admixture process. Cases of hunter-gatherer communities adopting certain elements of the Neolithic have been described in Europe11,14,45. However, the northwestern Africa Neolithization process involved the notable survival of genetically unadmixed local populations (represented by IAM), despite coexisting for at least 300 years with foreign farming communities (KTG), and still adopted several elements of the Neolithic ways of living from them. Whereas the archaeological findings in IAM and KTG point to the exchange of ideas between groups and support an acculturation process of foraging communities1,4, our genetic data show that the exchange of genes was unidirectional.

Another, distinct, ancestry was introduced to northwestern Africa during the Middle Neolithic. All individuals from SKH show large proportions of a genetic component maximized in individuals from Neolithic and Chalcolithic Levant, Ptolemaic Egypt and modern-day Near Eastern populations... Because this Neolithic Levantine ancestry has not been observed on the European side of the Mediterranean during the Neolithic, it probably represents an independent expansion of people from the Levant into North Africa. Migrations from the Levant to eastern Africa have been identified for Neolithic pastoralist individuals around 4,000 years ago

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authors: Luciana G. Simões, Torsten Günther, Rafael M. Martínez-Sánchez, Juan Carlos Vera-Rodríguez, Eneko Iriarte, Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela, Youssef Bokbot, Cristina Valdiosera & Mattias Jakobsson

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Genomic data from bones and teeth found at archaeological sites across Morocco paint a picture of how Neolithic farmers and pastoralists spread into northwest Africa that is more complex than previously thought.

The shift in human cultures from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to those based on the cultivation and husbandry of domesticated plants and animals is known as the Neolithic or agricultural transition. How Neolithic lifestyles spread into northwest Africa has been unclear, with archaeological findings providing conflicting evidence for both the migration of farmers into the area (demic diffusion) and the adoption of a Neolithic lifestyle by local foraging groups (cultural diffusion)1. Ancient human DNA could help to settle the debate. Writing in Nature, Simões et al.2 describe human genomic data from three previously unsampled archaeological sites in Morocco, dated to between 7,600 and 5,700 years ago — around the time when farming became established in the region3. The data provide an opportunity to refine and expand previous perspectives on the arrival and spread of Neolithic and pastoralist lifestyles in Morocco.

Ancient DNA reveals how farming spread into northwest Africa
Nature | 07 June 2023 | Louise Humphrey & Abdeljalil Bouzouggar

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This was toward the end of the African Humid Period. This may account for the Levantine pastoralists.