The oldest human DNA in Africa reveals the mysterious clues of ancient culture.

Louis Humphrey of the Natural History Museum excavated an ancient Moroccan skeleton. (Ian Cartwright/Institute of Archaeology) The oldest human DNA evidence from Africa has been found in a tomb in a cave in Morocco, providing new clues for the migration in the Stone Age.

The DNA sample comes from one of the oldest cemeteries in the world, located in the colony of Grotte des pigeon near the village of Tavor in the northeast.

About 15000 years ago, a hunter-gatherer culture buried their bodies with animal horns and other decorations. Although the ancient tomb was discovered as early as 2006, archaeologists began to dig this cave in the 1940s. [Photo album: Our nearest human ancestor]

This is the name given to this culture by researchers in the 20th century-Ibero-Uruguayans reflect a theory that people living in this corner of North Africa have close ties with Europe, perhaps crossing the Mediterranean by boat or land bridge from Iberian Peninsula or Sicily. Ibero-Uruguayan ruins were found in the Maghreb between the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea, spanning Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Some archaeologists believe that small blades on sites like Glodt Pigeon destroyed the stone tools of the tomb culture, which was widespread in southern Europe in the late Paleolithic period (about 50,000 to 65,438+0,000 years ago). Today, there are many European DNA in North Africa.

But the new DNA evidence tells another story about the origin of Ibero-Uruguayans. In the recent archaeological excavation conducted by Oxford University in grotte, archaeologists preserved the petrous bone of the inner ear, which is a good source of ancient DNA. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Human History in Jena, Germany, extracted the ancient mitochondrial DNA of seven people, which was only passed from mother to child, while the nuclear DNA was inherited from both parents. Of these five bones,

"Due to the challenge of DNA preservation conditions, there are relatively few ancient genomes found in Africa, and so far there is no earlier agricultural introduction than in North Africa," Marieke van de Loosdrecht, an ancient geneticist at the Max Planck Institute of Human History Science, said in a statement.

Contrary to grotte Des's theory that Sicilian or Iberian Europeans were buried in Glodt, the analysis shows that there is no genetic connection with southern Europe. On the contrary, the research results published in Science on March 15 show that about two-thirds of Iberians' DNA closely matches the ancient Natufiya, which is the existing late culture in the Middle East. This shows that Glodt pigeon people and Natufi people have the same ancestor, from North Africa or the Middle East.

According to a news report in Science magazine, about one-third of Ibero-Uruguayans' DNA is similar to that of sub-Saharan Africans, which may be inherited from older ancestors or contributed by immigrants in the contemporary Stone Age. These findings provide new evidence for the early contacts between North Africa and the Near East and sub-Saharan Africa, which are considered as the main obstacles to immigration.

Ancient DNA research broke out in Europe in the past few decades, covering the human historical records of 40 thousand years ago. Many scientists' laboratories studying ancient DNA are located in Europe, and researchers can obtain a large number of well-preserved remains.

The study of ancient African genome is even rarer. The researchers of this new study write that DNA preservation conditions in Africa are usually more challenging; Temperature rise tends to accelerate the decay of DNA. It was not until 20 15 that researchers published the first ancient African genome from human remains found in Ethiopia 4500 years ago.