Ancient DNA shows Stone Age Europeans sailed from the sea to Africa
A child, approximately 8,000 years old, was surprised to find its excavation from what is now Tunisia: ancestors of European hunter-gatherers
Stone Age people may have crossed the Mediterranean in wooden canoes.
Chronicle/Aramie Stock Photo
Thousands of years before Odysseus crossed the “Wind Dark Sea” in Homer’s epic Odysseyhunter-gatherers may have raided the islands on their way to Africa throughout the Mediterranean.
The first genomic studies of ancient peoples in the eastern Maghreb region of today’s Tunisia and northeastern Algeria show that Stone Age populations, which lived more than 8,000 years ago, have descended from European hunter-gatherers.
The discovery was reported on March 12th NatureThe first direct evidence of the mid-sea voyage during this period suggests cultural exchanges between hunter-gatherers in Europe and North Africa.
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Using ancient genomes, researchers mapped the emergence of Middle Eastern agriculture and its spread to Europe 12,000 years ago, but the Southern Mediterranean is largely ignored.
“There wasn’t much about North Africa,” says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who co-led the study. “It was a huge hole.”
Crossing from Europe
As in Europe, in collaboration with researchers from Algeria and Tunisia, Reich’s team sequenced the DNA of the bones or teeth of nine people from an archaeological site in the eastern Maghreb, who lived over 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
All carried the ancestors of local hunter-gatherers, as well as the ancient people of today, Moroccan, identified in previous studies. However, unlike the hunter-gatherers of the western Maghreb, whose ancestors were largely replaced by European farmers who had arrived in the Strait of Gibraltar, their local ancestors had been stubborn in Tunisia and Algeria after the arrival of farmers from Europe and the Middle East.
This fits the evidence that even farming imported sheep, goats and cattle, people in the eastern Maghreb continued to hunt local animals such as land snails and wild plants. Agriculture did not take off in the area until much later. Perhaps the resilience of local ancestors is related to resistance to agricultural practices.
The male genome on a Tunisian site called Djebba was filled with great surprises. Approximately 6% of his DNA could be traced back to European hunter-gatherers. Researchers estimate that his Magrevi ancestors were mixed with European hunter-gatherers around 8,500 years ago. Women on the site have signs that these signs of encounters are weak.
Canoe voyage
The exact source of male European ancestors could not be determined, but from hundreds of kilometers from the coast of Sicily-Tunisia – and a small island between the two continents is possible.
Obsidian on such island Pantereria was found in an archaeological site in Tunisia, says Giulio Lucarini, a research co-author of Giulio Lucarini, an archaeologist specializing in Africa at the Institute of Heritage Sciences of the Italian National Research Council in Rome.
Hunters-gatherers from Europe and North Africa may have sailed from island to island, crossing the Sicily Strait in long wooden canoes. Now, many potential outages are submerged, making it difficult to find further evidence of these voyages, adds Lucarini.
Discovering the ancestors of European hunter-gatherers in North Africa is important, says population geneticist Rosa Fregel at La Laguna University in Tenerife, Spain. It shows that the Mediterranean was not a major barrier for people in the Stone Age. Future research, she said, may generate more surprises on both sides of the ocean.
This article was reproduced with permission and was First published March 12, 2025.
