Importantly, a bone that is situated just below the ear, called the petrous, was intact.
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This Stone Age resettlement had previously been theorized, but the rare find allowed scientists to see what DNA looked like well before the time the migration would have taken place.
Scientists have found a complete assemblage of DNA from an ancient human in Africa for the first time.
Five years ago, researchers were able to assemble a genome of a Neanderthal from Croatia form fossils that were 38,000 years old.
The bones predate the “Eurasian backflow” event that from regions of Western Eurasia such as the Near East and Anatolia back to the Horn of Africa.
“But it goes further than that, because if you go to the corners of Africa, all the way to West Africa or South Africa, even populations that we really thought were purely African have 5-6% of their genome that dates back to these western Eurasian farmers”.
Due to the belief that climate played too detrimental a role in DNA preservation, scientists have eschewed Africa and, instead, fled to colder areas like Siberia, where far more of the skeletal remains are salvageable.
Why these migrants travelled back into Africa is a mystery but archaeological evidence links them to new crops developed in the Levant and brought to east Africa including wheat and barley.
But the new study suggests that “mind-blowing” numbers of people must have moved back to account for their presence in the DNA of modern Africans, accounting for around one third of the population. But the Mota genome didn’t contain any of the European DNA because he lived about 1,500 years before the migration.
While the genetic make-up of the Near East has changed completely over the last few thousand years, the closest modern equivalents to these Neolithic migrants are Sardinians, probably because Sardinia is an isolated island, says Jones.
Africa is considered the cradle of human genetic diversity, the place from which humans spread across the globe. The other was for members of the so-called LBK culture in Germany, early farmers who lived about 7,000 years ago.
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The researchers said the findings indicate that Africans were interacting with the larger world population. For ancient Africans, however, this has proven problematic because the tropical conditions obliterate DNA. “It’s much stronger than the idea of migration”. He passed down to them a genetic adaptation for high altitude living as well as lactose intolerance, both traits of modern-day populations there. This ancient Ethiopian highlander is most closely related to the Ari, an ethnic group that speaks Omotic languages in the Ethiopian highlands today. Previously palaeogeneticists discovered that DNA has a half-life of 521 years, meaning after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on. His 4,500-year-old remains were exquisitely preserved in a burial posture.
