Some experts believe that what happened in Europe some 7,400 years ago was like encountering an extraterrestrial civilization. For millennia, Europeans were nomadic hunters, the only known way of life on a vast and virtually uninhabited continent. Until they met immigrants from Anatolia in what is now Turkey, who brought with them agriculture, ranching and a sedentary lifestyle. Their advance through the northern Mediterranean was so rapid – lasting barely a century – that they are thought to have traveled the coast in small boats. It was a time of conflict and coexistence. Peasants interbred with natives until they were absorbed; though there were isolated hunter clans for another 1,000 years who remained true to their way of life. It is the so-called Neolithic Revolution that laid the foundations for civilization.
One of the biggest mysteries of the time is how this revolution came to Africa. One hypothesis is that it arose spontaneously with a second invention of crops, and another that it arose about 5,000 years ago by Middle Eastern herdsmen and farmers.
Now, a team led by scientists from the Universities of Burgos and Uppsala (Sweden) show that the Neolithic reached this area in the same chronology as Europe, around 7,400 years ago. Their conclusions, published in the journal Nature, are based on the analysis of teeth and bones excavated from four sites in Morocco and their comparison with others that already exist.
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The key is in the Kaf Taht el-Ghar cave on the north coast of the strait on the Moroccan side, where human remains, seeds and pieces of pottery decorated with seashells have been found. They were practically identical to those found on the peninsula.
Kaf Taht el-Ghar Cave, Early Neolithic.
“It was like finding a baroque cathedral in the middle of Aztec Mexico,” explains Rafael Martínez Sánchez, archaeologist at the University of Córdoba and co-author of the study.
Go or come back?
In the 1950s, when Morocco was still a Spanish protectorate, the Catalan archaeologist Miquel Tarradell was the first to excavate this site. There has been speculation that the decorated ceramics were brought across the straits from the peninsula by immigrants from North Africa, explains Martínez. But when Tarradell saw the pottery, he changed his mind and posited that it was the other way around: the Iberians brought it to Africa, although he died in 1995 without being able to prove it.
The DNA analysis of four people from this site has now solved the mystery. The genetic profile of these farmers is 75% that of the Peninsula. And about another third is North African. The conclusive evidence for the origin of these immigrants is that they also carry some of the DNA of previously assimilated European hunter-gatherers.
The conclusion of the work is that a group of farmers from the Iberian Peninsula came to North Africa, mixed with the local population and settled, bringing agriculture to the continent for the first time, some 1,000 years earlier than previously thought. They probably crossed the strait in wooden boats without sails and only with oars, Martínez points out, although no remains of these boats are known.
It’s something that has never been seen before. In Europe, hunter-gatherers never adopted the Neolithic way of life of their own accord, but always through devotion.
Cristina Valdiosera, University of Burgos
The puzzling thing is that at Ifri n’Amr o’Moussa, some 300 kilometers to the south, there is another site at least a century later where remains of Sami, pottery and livestock have been found, but whose residents have decided to give 100% be autochthonous. . Their DNA is indistinguishable from that of the nomadic hunter-gatherer populations that inhabited this area for some 15,000 years, including their tradition of pulling out the two upper incisors to distinguish themselves, as Louise Humphrey and Abdeljalil Bouzouggar explain in a companion article .
A few centuries later, the local population had adopted a sedentary life, although they did not mix with the immigrants from Europe, as if there was a well-defined boundary, similar to that which existed in parts of Europe between farmers and the last hunters.
“This is something never seen before,” says Cristina Valdiosera, a molecular biologist at the University of Burgos and co-author of the paper. “In Europe, hunter-gatherers never adopted the Neolithic way of life of their own accord, but always through absorption,” he points out.
On the brink of collapse
In 2018, Valdiosera conducted a similar study in the peninsula that showed the presence of farmers at times very similar to those in Morocco today. The geneticist estimates that the first groups of immigrants to cross the strait numbered dozens of individuals and that there must have been several waves on the same route.
Researcher Juan Carlos Vera in the Ifri n’Amr o’Moussa cave, early Neolithic.
Before the arrival of the first farmers, the populations of North Africa were on the brink of extinction. According to the work, while during the last ice age in Europe the population collapsed to almost 5,000 people, only 1,400 remained in North Africa. The arrival of immigrants was a salvation for them, Valdiosera argues, as it increased genetic diversity and prevented the evils of inbreeding.
The study confirms that about 1,000 years after the first Neolithic migratory wave, a second wave arrived from the Middle East, which now followed the southern Mediterranean coast until it reached present-day Morocco. DNA found in Skhirat-Rouazi on the country’s west coast from three people who lived 6,400 years ago reveals the genetic trait of this new wave of immigrants. The same mark can be found among the contemporary population of the Maghreb and also among the Guanches of the Canary Islands, whose origin lies in immigrants from North Africa.
complete misrepresentation
The most recent site analyzed is that of Kehf el Baroud, some 50 kilometers south of the previous one. In this case, its inhabitants already have DNA from the first Iberian farmers, as well as from the autochthonous population of North Africa and pastoral immigrants from the Middle East. A total mix.
Ron Pinhasi, an expert in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Vienna, calls this “an exciting and important study”. “There has been much debate as to whether the Neolithic arose spontaneously or whether it originated in Europe or the Middle East. Surprisingly, we see all of this happening, albeit not simultaneously. The first to initiate this period were the Iberian peasants. And here the most interesting thing is that they mixed with the locals, while some locals did not mix with them,” he points out.
Carles Lalueza Fox, a CSIC geneticist, believes that “there is no longer an example of the Neolithic being culturally transmitted.” “Although this was the general thinking a few decades ago, I think it is clear that agriculture cannot simply be explained or copied. Like any trade, it needs people who are familiar with it, i.e. emigrants, at least initially,” he explains.
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