Creationism in Crisis
Migrants Took Agriculture to North Africa 3,000 Years Before Creationists Claim Earth was Created out of Nothing.
Migrants Took Agriculture to North Africa 3,000 Years Before Creationists Claim Earth was Created out of Nothing.
View of the site Kaf Taht el-Ghar (KTG).
Photograph: Juan Carlos Vera
The Maghreb in North-West Africa
A research team from Sweden, Spain and Morocco have found genomic evidence that two waves of migrants took agriculture to North Africa in about 5400 BCE where it was adopted by the local population. One wave came along the north Mediterranean coast and through Iberia, and the second a short time later, from the Levant along the south Mediterranean coat.
For the previous 8,000 years and maybe even longer, the people of the western end of the Maghreb had been more or less isolated and lived as hunter-gatherers. Genetic evidence from 15,000 year old fossils shows that the population were intermediate between the people of the Levant and sub-Saharan Africans, and then, about 7,400 years ago, there was an ingression of Eurasia genes and culture from Spain as agriculturalists migrated to the Maghreb to live alongside the indigenous population, followed about a hundred years later, by a second wave of pastoralists from the Eastern end of the Mediterranean migrating along the North African coast, bringing a third population into the mix.
Later, in the Neolithic, these groups had merged into a single population.
It almost goes without saying that the team found no evidence of the population being exterminated in a flood, to be replaced after about 2000 BCE by a population from the Middle East, all descended from a small, incestuous band of eight related individuals, as they would have been if creationist fairy-tales were real history.
The News release from Uppsala University explains the study:
A genomic analysis of ancient human remains from Morocco in northwest Africa revealed that food production was introduced by Neolithic European and Levantine migrants and then adopted by local groups. A research team from Sweden, Spain and Morocco present their results in Nature on June 7th.
In northwestern Africa, lifestyle transitioned from foraging to farming some 7,400 years ago, but what sparked that change remained unclear. Previous studies support conflicting views: that migrant European Neolithic farmers brought the new way of life to North Africa, or that local hunter-gatherers adopted farming practices.
Then something happened.We found a remarkable population continuity up until seven and a half thousand years ago in northwestern Africa, where a group of local foragers had been living – isolated – for at least 8,000 years, perhaps since much further back in time.
Professor Mattias Jakobsson, co-senior author
Human Evolution
Department of Organismal Biology and SciLifeLab
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Swede.
After being isolated for so long, northwestern Africa received two new ancestries within ca. 1000 years, one migration wave following the northern Mediterranean coast, and another, the southern.
A foreign ancestry related to the first European Farmers is found in North Africa in the remains of the earliest Neolithic context around 7500 years ago [indicating that migrants from Europe introduced this new lifestyle].
Dr. Luciana G. Simões, first author
Human Evolution
Department of Organismal Biology and SciLifeLab
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Swede.Inspired by their new neighbours, within a few hundred years, the local foragers started to change their way of life to farming and the two groups lived side by side for at least another century.
Dr. Cristina Valdiosera, co-senior author
Universidad de Burgos
Departamento de Historia, Geografía y Comunicaciones, Burgos, SpainThis phenomenon has not been seen in any other part of the world.
Dr. Torsten Günther, co-author
Human Evolution
Department of Organismal Biology and SciLifeLab
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Swede.
Around 6,300 years ago, a new genetic ancestry appeared in the human remains, likely as a consequence of migrants from the Levant arriving at the same time as pastoralism arrives in the region. Later, all three ancestries blend together during the Late Neolithic.
I think it is great that the genomic data generated in this study confirms what the ceramic decoration was already pointing to: a unidirectional diffusion from the Iberian coast to the Tingitana Peninsula, around 7500 years ago.
Dr. Rafael Martínez Sánches, co-author
Departamento de Historia
Universidad de Córdoba, Cordoba, Spain.Filling these key chronological gaps in the Maghreb proved crucial to better understand how the different subsistence strategies were acquired in this region.
Dr. Youssef Bokbot, co-author
Institut National des Sciences de l’Archéologie et du Patrimoine, Rabat, Morocco
Article: Simões, L.G., Günther, T., Martínez-Sánchez, R.M. et al.
Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants from Iberia and Levant.
Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06166-6
Fig. 1: Overview of ancient northwestern African genetic composition.
a, Geographic location of investigated archaeological sites. Symbol legend given in c. The map was generated using the open source QGIS Geographic Information System, http://qgis.osgeo.org. b, Chronological representation of the investigated archaeological time periods of northwestern Africa, with each site’s radiocarbon-dated timeline indicated. c, Enlarged view of a PCA plot (Supplementary Fig. 3) with focus on the ancient individuals analysed. Each projected ancient individual is represented by a coloured symbol. W. Eur., West European; hist., historical. d, Estimated ancestry proportions for relevant African, Middle Eastern and European (Eur.) modern-day and ancient individuals (assuming five ancestry components; additional results are presented in Supplementary Fig. 4). Pre-Neolithic and Neolithic northwestern African populations/individuals are highlighted by the same symbols used in a and c.
More details are given in the abstract to the team's open access paper in Nature:
AbstractAt times it must seem to creationists that not only the scientists but the facts they reveal themselves are all part of a giant conspiracy to prove their childish superstitions have no basis in historical or scientific facts. Of course, suffering as they do, from the teleological thinking defect, they would have no difficulty in seeing everything in conspiratorial terms, as all ganging up against them, especially since feeling persecuted seems to be an important art of being a religious fundamentalist.
In northwestern Africa, lifestyle transitioned from foraging to food production around 7,400 years ago but what sparked that change remains unclear. Archaeological data support conflicting views: (1) that migrant European Neolithic farmers brought the new way of life to North Africa1,2,3 or (2) that local hunter-gatherers adopted technological innovations4,5. The latter view is also supported by archaeogenetic data6. Here we fill key chronological and archaeogenetic gaps for the Maghreb, from Epipalaeolithic to Middle Neolithic, by sequencing the genomes of nine individuals (to between 45.8- and 0.2-fold genome coverage). Notably, we trace 8,000 years of population continuity and isolation from the Upper Palaeolithic, via the Epipaleolithic, to some Maghrebi Neolithic farming groups. However, remains from the earliest Neolithic contexts showed mostly European Neolithic ancestry. We suggest that farming was introduced by European migrants and was then rapidly adopted by local groups. During the Middle Neolithic a new ancestry from the Levant appears in the Maghreb, coinciding with the arrival of pastoralism in the region, and all three ancestries blend together during the Late Neolithic. Our results show ancestry shifts in the Neolithization of northwestern Africa that probably mirrored a heterogeneous economic and cultural landscape, in a more multifaceted process than observed in other regions.
Simões, L.G., Günther, T., Martínez-Sánchez, R.M. et al.
Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants from Iberia and Levant.
Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06166-6
Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
But, to a person with normal adult thinking abilities, the fact that scientists keep revealing facts such as these that utterly refute creationism would be a reason to wonder if the tales they were told as children might have no basis in truth. To a creationist however, the worst thing imaginable is the prospect of being wrong because, as psychologists have shown, the prospect of being wrong is such an existential threat to creationists that they will do anything to avoid it.
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