Luxmanda is an archaeological site located in the north-central

Babati District Babati Rural District is a district of Manyara Region of Tanzania, East Africa. The administrative capital of the district is Babati town, south of Arusha. The district covers an area of , a large proportion (640 km2) of which is covered b ...

Tanzania Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands ...

. It was discovered in 2012. Excavations in the area have identified it as the largest and southernmost settlement site of the

Savanna Pastoral Neolithic The Savanna Pastoral Neolithic (SPN; formerly known as the Stone Bowl Culture) is a collection of ancient societies that appeared in the Rift Valley of East Africa and surrounding areas during a time period known as the Pastoral Neolithic. The ...

(SPN), an archaeologically-recognized pastoralist culture centered in eastern Africa during a time period known as the

Pastoral Neolithic The Pastoral Neolithic (5000 BP - 1200 BP) refers to a period in Africa's prehistory, specifically Tanzania and Kenya, marking the beginning of food production, livestock domestication, and pottery use in the region following the Later Stone Age. ...

(ca. 5000–1200 BP). Radiocarbon dating of charcoal, human collagen, and organic matter in ceramic artifacts indicate that Luxmanda was occupied between 3,200 to 2,900 years ago.

Ceramics A ceramic is any of the various hard, brittle, heat-resistant and corrosion-resistant materials made by shaping and then firing an inorganic, nonmetallic material, such as clay, at a high temperature. Common examples are earthenware, porcelain ...

(of the Narosura type), lithics, worked bone, ivory, and

ostrich Ostriches are large flightless birds of the genus ''Struthio'' in the order Struthioniformes, part of the infra-class Palaeognathae, a diverse group of flightless birds also known as ratites that includes the emus, rheas, and kiwis. There ...

eggshell assemblages in addition to livestock and human bones have been recovered from the Luxmanda site. The people of Luxmanda were highly specialized pastoralists, relying on cattle, sheep, goats, and donkeys for subsistence. Their linguistic affiliation is unknown, but some historical linguists have speculated that the peoples of the SPN spoke Cushitic languages. The Pastoral Neolithic was followed by the Pastoral Iron Age and the Bantu Expansion.

Ancient DNA analysis

Admixture clustering analysis of a 3,100 year old female infant skeleton exhumed at Luxmanda found that the individual carried approximately 38±1% of her ancestry related to the

Pre-Pottery Neolithic The Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) represents the early Neolithic in the Levantine and upper Mesopotamian region of the Fertile Crescent, dating to years ago, (10000 – 6500 BCE).Richard, Suzanne ''Near Eastern archaeology'' Eisenbrauns; il ...

culture of the

Levant The Levant () is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is ...

. New genetic data from Luxmanda suggest that this affinity is likely due to either migration into Africa of descendants of pre-pottery farmers from the Levant, or common descent from a non-African ancestral population that inhabited Africa or the Near East several millennia before. All the males tested for Y chromosomal DNA clustered with E1b1b subclades, with two yielding ambivalent A1b subclades due to insufficient collage

The African part of Luxmanda individual's ancestry was fitted as being most closely related to a hunter-gatherer population that inhabited

Ethiopia Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...

ca. 4,500 BP (under a two-population admixture scenario, with inferred ancestry proportions of 62.2–62.8% for the hunter-gather component and 37.2-37.8% for the

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) is part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, a Neolithic culture centered in upper Mesopotamia and the Levant, dating to years ago, that is, 8800–6500 BC. It was typed by British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon durin ...

component) or also from a population related to the

Dinka The Dinka people ( din, Jiɛ̈ɛ̈ŋ) are a Nilotic ethnic group native to South Sudan with a sizable diaspora population abroad. The Dinka mostly live along the Nile, from Jonglei to Renk, in the region of Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile (two out ...

(under a three-population admixture scenario, with an inferred ancestry proportion of 39% ± 1% Levantine-related ancestry).
Table S5. Details of Ancestry Proportions Inferred Using qpAdm, Related to Figure 2
/ref> Furthermore, haplogroup analysis indicated that the Luxmanda specimen bore the Haplogroup L2 (mtDNA), haplogroup L2a1 (mtDNA). Scientists had previously dated the arrival of Western Eurasian-related ancestry in eastern Africa, which is now pervasive in the region, to around 3000 BP on average. The new genetic data suggest that the makers of the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic were responsible for spreading ancient Levant-related ancestry in the lacustrine region, where they had established new settlements. The Luxmanda individual's population also likely introduced herding to southern Africa, since a 1,200 year old pastoralist individual from the Western Cape was found to bear affinities with the Luxmanda sample.

References

{{National Historic Sites of Tanzania 2012 archaeological discoveries Archaeological sites in Tanzania Archaeological sites of Eastern Africa