Stone Age Europeans sailed by sea to Africa
The Eastern Maghreb: a huge hole before the arrival of Odysseus crossed the sea: Local ancestry and resistance to farming practices
Thousands of years before Odysseus crossed the ‘wine-dark sea’ in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, hunter-gatherers might have island-hopped their way to Africa across the Mediterranean.
All carried local hunter-gatherer ancestry, similar to that of ancient people from what is now Morocco, identified in earlier studies. But unlike those western Maghreb hunter-gatherers — whose ancestry was largely replaced by European farmers probably arriving through the Strait of Gibraltar — local ancestry persisted in Tunisia and Algeria long after the arrival of farmers from Europe and the Middle East.
“There’s not been much of a North African story,” says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who co-led the study. “It was a huge hole.”
This fits with evidence that people in the eastern Maghreb continued to hunt local animals such as land snails and forage wild plants, even while farming imported sheep, goats and cattle. Agriculture didn’t take off in the region until much later. Maybe, says Reich, the resilience of local ancestry is related to resistance to farming practices.
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Researchers have said that eastern Maghreb carried local indigenous hunter-gatherer ancestry similar to that of ancient people from what’s now Morocco. But unlike those western Maghreb hunter-gatherers, whose ancestry was largely replaced by European farmers probably arriving through the Strait of Gibraltar, the local ancestry persisted in Tunisia and Algeria long after the arrival of farmers from Europe and the Middle East.