Two 7000-year-old mummies, which are the remains of female herders from a time when the Sahara was more humid and known as the Green Sahara, have been found to be from a group with a previously unknown ancestry.
The mummies were discovered in a Takarkori rock shelter in the Sahara, and DNA analysis revealed they are most closely related to other North African peoples who diverged from Sub-Saharan populations long before.
'The majority of Takarkori individuals' ancestry stems from a previously unknown North African genetic lineage that diverged from sub-Saharan African lineages around the same time as present-day humans outside Africa and remained isolated throughout most of its existence,' wrote the authors of the paper published in Nature.
Read the full story in Popular Mechanics.