Posted by pseudolus 7 days ago
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.
"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"
Click-baity title?
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.
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.
This evidence is found everywhere. But it's dateable, and you can find the oldest instances of it in the fertile crescent.
"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.
You cannot prove it didn’t happen, and I also don’t think it was that likely. Both can be true.
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.
Edit: clarified the question
Which is to say that no, a very slim chance is not a reasonable position to take in most contexts.
You don't have to prove something that doesn't exist. Find the evidence, and prove it does.
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.
7000-year-old-skeletons-from-the-green-sahara-reveal-a-previously-unknown-human-lineage-
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.