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Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea to Africa
Roughly 8,000-year-old remains unearthed from present-day Tunisia held a surprise: European hunter-gatherer ancestry.
The first genomic study of ancient people from the eastern Maghreb region — present-day Tunisia and northeastern Algeria — shows that Stone Age populations who lived there more than 8,000 years ago were descended, in part, from European hunter-gatherers. The discovery, reported on 12 March in Nature 1, is the first direct evidence of trans-Mediterranean sea voyaging during this time, although archaeological finds have hinted at cultural exchange between European and North African hunter-gatherers. 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.
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