What's interesting is that the population remained isolated for tens of thousands of years.
Generally speaking, people move around and are promiscuous. Staying isolated for that long implies a physical barrier, because cultures generally don't survive for 40,000 years. But an isolated population means genetic issues - but if the population is big then they should have spread at least somewhat.
I’ve been enjoying a podcast called Our Prehistory. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, the first few episodes get really into this, and it’s definitely sunk some misconceptions I had about evolution (that other species groups lived among the Homo Sapiens), why they died out, more branches than originally thought etc.
Paper @ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08793-7
"Our admixture dating analysis points to events far back in time, suggesting a more heterogeneous spread of pastoralism and food production in the Sahara compared to Morocco and East Africa"
Curious how this post says '5 Hours ago' but if you search or click 'smithsonianmag.com' up there, you see this as a post that says 3 days ago?
The moderators keep an eye out for interesting content that is ignored on submission, and put the posts back into a queue to be published again.
Thanks to both of you!
The admins do this sometimes, it's called the "second-chance pool" or something like that. They'll look at stories from the past few days that deserved more attention than they got, and essentially re-submit them.
oh my god they were roommates
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What exactly is "mysterious" about it?
Click-baity title?
> "despite practicing animal husbandry—a cultural innovation that originated outside Africa"
Animal husbandry was a response to unproductive hunting. And since desertification - hence unproductive hunting- started long time ago in Africa, it makes sense that animal husbandry started there too before it appeared elsewhere.
Animal husbandry did not start in Africa, though. It started in the fertile crescent and spread into Africa. This is very well attested in archaeological finds, and in the fact that the relevant animals were domesticated first there.
The surprising news is that the spread of animal husbandry didn't seem to accompany the spread of human genes -- the subsistence strategy was adopted by learning, not by people moving.
I don't think this is very shocking because the same thing seems to have happened elsewhere. While agriculture mostly spread by people moving, the culture that developed into all the pastoral cultures of the Eurasian steppe seem to have been hunter-gatherers living in close proximity to farmers.
But how does that prove there was no animal husbandry in Africa in the prior hundreds of thousands of years?
Animal husbandry leaves behind a lot of evidence, starting from different distributions of animal ages and sexes found in bones in refuse pits, to genetic evidence of artificial selection.
This evidence is found everywhere. But it's dateable, and you can find the oldest instances of it in the fertile crescent.
Do you really need me to remind you that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?
Maybe “burden of proof” is a phrase to get re-acquainted with? Why do you think an apparently unsubstantiated alternative should be considered despite the archeological record?
Did any of you guys read the article? In the first few paragraphs:
"They’ve successfully analyzed the DNA of two naturally mummified livestock herders who died roughly 7,000 years ago in present-day Libya, which was part of what’s known as the “green Sahara.”
The article says they were practising animal husbandry - I'm guessing they have evidence for that!
So the question is not whether they did it, but whether they started doing it themselves or were taught it by others.
Who said I wanted to prove it did happen?
You cannot prove it didn’t happen, and I also don’t think it was that likely. Both can be true.
I also can't show conclusive evidence that there wasn't a continent of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic 10k years ago that mysteriously disappeared without a trace. Yet if someone enters a conversation about geography with me and inquiries about Atlantis I'm probably going to tell them that it never existed without bothering to wrap that statement in multiple layers of clarification about the evidence and probability estimates and highly unlikely contingencies.
We can't prove that there wasn't some isolated genius who engaged in animal husbandry in Africa before everyone else but was ignored by the rest of his tribe or whatever. But we have managed to place some fairly low upper bound on how much of that could have been happening. At some point it is reasonable to conclude that your typical society in that time and place didn't have access to it.
Well sure a very slim chance is a reasonable position.
Not in the way that people usually use those words. "Reasonable position" generally refers to a reasonable assumption to make or gamble to take. Something technically remaining within the realm of possibility is not that.
And your personal opinion on this alleged standard is relevant because…?
Edit: clarified the question
Because the two of us appear to be attempting to communicate and effective use of language requires some level of mutual understanding of vocabulary. The statement you made does not hold when those words are taken to mean what I broadly understand them to mean.
Which is to say that no, a very slim chance is not a reasonable position to take in most contexts.
Because there's no evidence of it until after it was developed outside of Africa?
You don't have to prove something that doesn't exist. Find the evidence, and prove it does.
"He majored in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it one day." - tom lehrer.
I think the development cordage(rope) and woodworking techniques would have a heavy influence on slowing down, noticing the surrounding abundance. Once a location becomes favorable more substantial and long lasting structures could be made.
My question is what was the divide that kept these groups at 50kyo. Something kept them apart.
I hope they get samples from different beings to analyze.
it is one logical pathway, but another is to simply move to a new area, rather than develop animal husbandry. Which one seems more likely?
Both at the same time. If you repeatedly migrate in order to maintain a foraging and hunting lifestyle, you are sufficiently aware of the undependability of foraging and hunting to make large R&D investments in experimental methods of agriculture and animal husbandry.
Depends on how many science points and settlers you have, and where you are on the rest of the tech tree.
Please accept my critique to Smithsonian Mag made in good faith: never use the word 'mysterious' [a nod to the magical thinking] in a science context. Really looks like CNN-ish dark pattern. The URL slug has a better word choice:
7000-year-old-skeletons-from-the-green-sahara-reveal-a-previously-unknown-human-lineage-
mysterious: adj. difficult or impossible to understand, explain, or identify.
While magic requires mystery, mystery does not require magic and they are not synonyms. It is perfectly valid to state something is a scientific mystery without implying magic is involved in some way.
Would you be able to explain the mystery = magic thinking connection? I've not heard it before. I've obviously heard magic being described as mysterious, but not that mysterious stuff implies magic.
I don't see the connection between mysterious and magical thinking. It just means it is a mystery and I don't see anything that implies magic about a mystery.
The skeletons are mysterious and important.