An international research team has extracted genome-wide ancient DNA from two 7,000-year-old mummified women buried in a Libyan rock shelter, identifying a deeply divergent human lineage that appears to have left little to no detectable genetic trace in living populations, based on the study’s comparisons with present-day datasets. The remains, recovered from the Takarkori site in southwestern Libya, represent the first reported genome-wide ancient DNA from people living in the Green Sahara, a period when the world’s largest desert was lush and habitable. The findings, reported in new genomic research, rewrite assumptions about who lived in North Africa thousands of years before later waves of migration reshaped the region’s gene pool.
First Genomes From a Vanished Green Sahara
The two individuals, catalogued as TK RS H1 and H9, were Pastoral Neolithic females whose bones had naturally mummified in the dry conditions of the Takarkori rock shelter. Researchers obtained DNA from these remains, which Reuters described as the oldest-known mummified human remains in this research context, and they yielded the first genome-wide ancient DNA data from the Green Sahara. The Green Sahara itself was a climatic window, roughly 11,000 to 5,000 years ago, when monsoon rains turned vast stretches of what is now barren desert into grasslands, lakes, and river systems capable of supporting cattle herders and foragers.
Earlier work on these same Takarkori individuals had already produced the earliest published ancient DNA from the Sahara region, limited at that stage to mitochondrial genomes. That predecessor study identified a basal branch of haplogroup N, a deep maternal lineage found in the Holocene Green Sahara, and supplied direct radiocarbon dates with calibrated ranges placing the burials around 7,000 years ago. The new Nature paper builds on those mitochondrial results by recovering nuclear DNA across the full genome, a technical leap made possible through optimized in-solution enrichment methods designed for degraded ancient specimens.
A Lineage With No Living Descendants
The central finding is stark: most of the Takarkori women’s ancestry derives from a deeply divergent North African lineage that, the researchers report, shows limited affinity to sub-Saharan African and Eurasian-related ancestries and has little detectable contribution in present-day populations. The scientific coverage describes this as a ghost population visible only through ancient bones, underscoring how little of its genetic legacy survives in modern people. That disconnect could mean the group declined, was absorbed by later arrivals, or that any surviving genetic signal became difficult to detect in present-day North Africans given later admixture.
What makes this lineage especially striking is its relationship to an even older population. The Takarkori ancestry is closely related to that first documented at Taforalt, a cave site in Morocco where 15,000-year-old foragers known as Iberomaurusians were sequenced in 2018. Those Taforalt genomes had already surprised geneticists by showing a mix of Near Eastern and sub-Saharan African affinities, but the Takarkori data suggests that a related North African branch persisted for thousands of years in the Sahara with limited detectable outside genetic input. The continuity between the two sites, separated by thousands of miles and millennia, points to a population that maintained its genetic identity across a vast and changing environment.
Why Later Migrations Erased the Signal
The limited detectability of this lineage in the modern gene pool gains sharper context when set against what happened next in North African population history. Genomic evidence shows that migrations and admixture into Northwest Africa during the Neolithic brought Iberian-related and Levantine-related genetic inputs that reshaped the region’s demographics. Those movements, tied to the spread of farming and herding technologies from the eastern Mediterranean and southern Europe, introduced ancestry components that dominate present-day North African genomes. The Takarkori lineage, by contrast, appears to predate and remain separate from those later arrivals.
This pattern raises a question that the DNA alone cannot fully answer: did the Green Sahara population vanish because of climate collapse, competition with incoming groups, or simple demographic swamping over centuries of intermarriage? The drying of the Sahara around 5,000 years ago would have compressed habitable zones and forced migrations, creating conditions where small, isolated populations could be absorbed or displaced rapidly. Research on cultural transitions in southern African populations has shown that cultural diffusion, in the absence of significant gene flow, can drive major shifts in technology and subsistence without leaving a genetic footprint. A similar dynamic may have operated in reverse here: the Takarkori people’s pastoral practices could have spread to neighboring groups even as their genetic lineage faded.
What the Coverage Gets Wrong About Isolation
Much of the early reporting on this discovery has framed the Takarkori lineage as a “mysterious” or “lost” population, language that risks implying these people lived in total isolation like an uncontacted tribe. The genetic data tells a more specific story. The Takarkori women were cattle herders, participants in the Pastoral Neolithic cultural complex that spread across the Sahara. They shared technologies and likely traded with neighbors. What they did not do, at least not at a scale detectable in their genomes, is intermarry extensively with sub-Saharan African or Eurasian-derived groups. That distinction between cultural exchange and genetic exchange is critical. Populations can share tools, food production strategies, and symbolic practices without immediately blending their gene pools.
In this light, the Takarkori lineage is not evidence of an isolated backwater but of a regionally rooted group that maintained its ancestry while participating in wider Saharan networks. Archaeological traces of rock art, ceramics, and animal husbandry at the site fit a broader pattern of pastoral lifeways that stretched across what is now Libya, Niger, and Chad. The fact that these women carried a deeply divergent genome does not mean they lacked contact; it means that, for thousands of years, their community navigated exchange and mobility without the large-scale population replacement that would later accompany Neolithic expansions from the Mediterranean rim. Understanding that nuance helps avoid sensationalist narratives that treat ancient Africans as static or cut off from broader currents of innovation.
Reconstructing Lives From Fragmentary Genomes
Behind the sweeping conclusions about vanished lineages lies painstaking laboratory work. Ancient DNA in hot, arid environments is notoriously fragile, and the success at Takarkori depended on techniques honed across many projects. Researchers relied on targeted capture approaches that enrich for human DNA fragments, sifting them from a background dominated by microbial and environmental contamination. These kinds of methods, described across specialized genetics journals, can help teams recover enough coverage to model ancestry components and test different demographic scenarios. Authenticity checks, including characteristic damage patterns and replicate extractions, helped confirm that the sequences genuinely reflected 7,000-year-old individuals rather than modern contaminants.
Even so, the genomes remain partial, and the inferences necessarily probabilistic. The Takarkori women represent only two data points within a vast and still poorly sampled Sahara. Other yet-undiscovered groups may have carried related or entirely distinct ancestries, and additional finds could refine or complicate the current picture. For now, the Libyan mummies provide a rare anchor for reconstructing population structure in a region where shifting sands have erased many sites. As more ancient DNA emerges from North Africa and adjacent areas, researchers will be able to test whether the Takarkori lineage was widespread or localized, and how it interacted with contemporaneous communities further south and along the Nile.
That broader comparative framework will also illuminate how climate, culture, and demography intertwined during the Holocene. The Green Sahara was not simply a backdrop for pastoralism; it was an engine of movement, experimentation, and social change. By tying specific genomes to dated archaeological contexts, the Takarkori study links individual lives to that larger story of environmental transformation. The women whose remains lay undisturbed in a rock shelter for seven millennia now stand at the center of a debate about how many human lineages once shared the continent and how many have disappeared without a trace. Their DNA, fragile yet enduring, offers a reminder that the genetic landscape of the past was more diverse than what survives in living populations, and that much of humanity’s history remains buried, waiting for the next careful excavation.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
