The Sahara desert, once lush and green, housed the mysterious human line, the study said

The Sahara desert, formerly lush and green, for a period between 14,500 and 5,000 years, also housed a mysterious human line, revealed a new study.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology of Germany detailed in a study published in Nature this week their DNA results of two naturally mummified people of 7,000 years excavated from the Takarkori rock refuge in southwest Libya.

Humans lived during the “African wet period” when the Sahara desert was green and dotted with lakes and streams. Humans lived in the region, and pastoralism – or the held herd – was widespread, researchers said.

Aridification, when a region is gradually becoming and increasingly dry, has today transformed the formerly lush oasis into a desert of the Sahara.

Using genomic analysis, researchers have found that the North African line diverge populations from sub-Saharan Africa at the same time as modern human lines that spread outside Africa about 50,000 years ago.

Takarkori mummies had their own unique and isolated line.

Mummies shared close genetic links with 15,000 -year -old foragers who lived during the Ice Age at Taforalt Cave, Morocco. The researchers also drawn the neandertale ancestry of mummies and found that they had ten times less the Neanderthal DNA than people outside of Africa, but more than contemporary sub -Saharan Africans.

“Our results suggest that if the first North African populations have been largely isolated, they received traces of Neanderthal DNA due to the genetic flow from outside Africa,” the main author Johannes Krause, director of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said.

The results also revealed that the “green Sahara” was not as widely used for migration as we thought previously, the researchers said. This meant that instead of different populations mixing for large movements, the groups have more likely rarely interacted and did it thanks to cultural exchange.

“Our research questions the previous hypotheses on the history of the North African population and highlights the existence of a deeply rooted and long-term genetic line,” said Nada Salem, the first author and researcher of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “This discovery reveals how pastoralism spreads through the green Sahara, probably by cultural exchange rather than by large -scale migration.”