RT Journal Article
T1 Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants from Iberia and Levant
A1 Simões, Luciana G.
A1 Günther, Torsten
A1 Martínez Sánchez, Rafael M.
A1 Vera Rodríguez, Juan Carlos
A1 Iriarte, Eneko
A1 Rodríguez Varela, Ricardo
A1 Bokbot, Youssef
A1 Valdiosera Morales, Cristina
A1 Jakobsson, Mattias
AB In northwestern Africa, lifestyle transitioned from foraging to food production around 7,400 years ago but what sparked that change remains unclear. Archaeological data support conflicting views: (1) that migrant European Neolithic farmers brought the new way of life to North Africa1–3 or (2) that local hunter-gatherers adopted technological innovations4,5. The latter view is also supported by archaeogenetic data6. Here we fill key chronological and archaeogenetic gaps for the Maghreb, from Epipalaeolithic to Middle Neolithic, by sequencing the genomes of nine individuals(to between 45.8- and 0.2-fold genome coverage). Notably, we trace 8,000 years ofpopulation continuity and isolation from the Upper Palaeolithic, via the Epipaleolithic,to some Maghrebi Neolithic farming groups. However, remains from the earliestNeolithic contexts showed mostly European Neolithic ancestry. We suggest thatfarming was introduced by European migrants and was then rapidly adopted bylocal groups. During the Middle Neolithic a new ancestry from the Levant appears inthe Maghreb, coinciding with the arrival of pastoralism in the region, and all threeancestries blend together during the Late Neolithic. Our results show ancestry shiftsin the Neolithization of northwestern Africa that probably mirrored a heterogeneouseconomic and cultural landscape, in a more multifaceted process than observed inother regions.
PB Springer
SN 0028-0836
SN 1476-4687 (electrónico)
YR 2023
FD 2023-06
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10272/23423
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10272/23423
LA eng
NO Simões, L. G., Günther, T., Martínez-Sánchez, R. M., Vera-Rodríguez, J. C., Iriarte, E., Rodríguez-Varela, R., Bokbot, Y., Valdiosera, C., & Jakobsson, M. (2023). Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants from Iberia and Levant. In Nature (Vol. 618, Issue 7965, pp. 550–556). Springer Science and Business Media LLC. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06166-6
NO Open access funding provided by Uppsala University.We thank A. R. Munters for bioinformatics support and R. P. Stjerna and F. Sánchez-Quinto for helpful discussions on data analysis. Sequencing was performed at The National Genomics Infrastructure, Uppsala. Computations and data handling were enabled by resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing at the Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science, partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement no. 2018-05973. This project was supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (to M.J.), Vetenskapsrådet (grant nos. 2018-05537 and 2022-04642 to M.J. and 2017-05267 to T.G.) and Ramón y Cajal (grant no. RYC2018-025223-I to C.V.). The Spanish–Moroccan archaeological team was supported by the European Research Council (no. ERC AdG 230561).
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 30 may 2026