High continuity of forager ancestry in the Neolithic period of the eastern Maghreb
More On Article
- The bioarchaeology of tobacco use: An exploratory study of nicotine and cotinine detection in tooth dentine.
- Buca della Iena and Grotta del Capriolo: New chronological, lithic, and faunal analyses of two late Mousterian sites in Central Italy
- New Publication by HEAS Member Offers New Insights into Ancient Roman Settlement Patterns in Austria
- Home is where my villa is: a machine learning-based predictive suitability map for Roman features in Northern Noricum (ca. 50–500 CE/Lower Austria/AUT)
- HEAS Keynote with Necmi Karul Takes Place in Vienna
Lipson, M., Ringbauer, H., Lucarini, G., Aouadi, N., Aoudia, L., Belhouchet, L., Cheronet, O., Dahmani, A.-R., Genchi, F., La Pastina, F., Lucci, M., de Lumley, H., Mansouri, N., Nava, A., Touj, F., Mallick, S., Rohland, N., Coppa, A., Pinhasi, R., Reich, D., 2025. High continuity of forager ancestry in the Neolithic period of the eastern Maghreb. Nature.
Abstract
Ancient DNA from the Mediterranean region has revealed long-range connections and population transformations associated with the spread of food-producing economies1,2,3,4,5,6. However, in contrast to Europe, genetic data from this key transition in northern Africa are limited, and have only been available from the far western Maghreb (Morocco)1,2,3. Here we present genome-wide data for nine individuals from the Later Stone Age through the Neolithic period from Algeria and Tunisia. The earliest individuals cluster with pre-Neolithic people of the western Maghreb (around 15,000–7,600 years before present (bp)), showing that this ‘Maghrebi’ ancestry profile had a substantial geographic and temporal extent. At least one individual from Djebba (Tunisia), dating to around 8,000 years bp, harboured ancestry from European hunter–gatherers, probably reflecting movement in the Early Holocene across the Strait of Sicily. Later Neolithic people from the eastern Maghreb retained largely local forager ancestry, together with smaller contributions from European farmers (by around 7,000 years bp) and Levantine groups (by around 6,800 years bp), and were thus far less impacted by external gene flow than were populations in other parts of the Neolithic Mediterranean.