Kehf el Baroud, sometimes mistakenly spelled Kelif el Boroud, is an archaeological site in

Morocco Morocco, officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It has coastlines on the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to Algeria–Morocc ...

. It is located to the south of

Rabat Rabat (, also , ; ) is the Capital (political), capital city of Morocco and the List of cities in Morocco, country's seventh-largest city with an urban population of approximately 580,000 (2014) and a metropolitan population of over 1.2 million. ...

, near the Aterian industry of Dar es Soltan.

Genetics

examined the remains of 8 individuals buried at Kelif el Boroud (c. 3780-3650

BCE Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the o ...

) during the Late Neolithic. The 1 sample of

Y-DNA The Y chromosome is one of two sex chromosomes in therian mammals and other organisms. Along with the X chromosome, it is part of the XY sex-determination system, in which the Y is the sex-determining chromosome because the presence of the Y ...

extracted belonged to the paternal haplogroup T-M184, while the 6 samples of

mtDNA Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA and mDNA) is the DNA located in the mitochondria organelles in a eukaryotic cell that converts chemical energy from food into adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Mitochondrial DNA is a small portion of the DNA contained in ...

extracted belonged to the maternal haplogroups X2b (two samples), K1a1b1 (two samples), K1a4a1 and lastly T2b3, with the other being undetermined. The examined individuals were found to share genetic affinities with individuals buried at both the Early Neolithic sites of

Ifri N'Amr Ou Moussa Ifri n'Amr Ou Moussa is an archaeological site discovered in 2005, located in the rural commune of Aït Siberne, Khémisset Province, in Western Morocco. This site has revealed burials associated with both Moroccan Early Neolithic and Bell Beaker ...

in Morocco and the Early Neolithic Cave of El Toro in Spain. They were modelled as being of about 50%

Early European Farmer Early European Farmers (EEF) were a group of the Anatolian Neolithic Farmers (ANF) who brought agriculture to Europe and Northwest Africa. The Anatolian Neolithic Farmers were an ancestral component, first identified in farmers from Anatolia (als ...

(EEF) ancestry and 50% local North African (IAM) ancestry, suggesting substantial migration from

Iberia The Iberian Peninsula ( ), also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in south-western Europe. Mostly separated from the rest of the European landmass by the Pyrenees, it includes the territories of peninsular Spain and Continental Portugal, compri ...

into North Africa during the Neolithic era of human history. Moreover, they were found to have had a lower amount of

Sub-Saharan Africa Sub-Saharan Africa is the area and regions of the continent of Africa that lie south of the Sahara. These include Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa. Geopolitically, in addition to the list of sovereign states and ...

n admixture than earlier North Africans buried at Ifri N'Amr Ou Moussa, but as well as present North Africans, suggesting that trans-Saharan migrations occurred after. Furthermore, unlike the earlier Ifri N'Amr population, they were fair skinned, and carried various alleles associated with

light skin Light skin is a human skin color that has a low level of eumelanin pigmentation as an adaptation to environments of low Ultraviolet, UV radiation. Due to migrations of people in recent centuries, light-skinned populations today are found all ov ...

and light eye colors. The Kelif el Boroud inhabitants were additionally found to be closely related to the native

Guanches The Guanche were the Indigenous peoples, indigenous inhabitants of the Spain, Spanish Canary Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean some to the west of modern Morocco and the North African coast. The islanders spoke the Guanche language, which i ...

of the

Canary Islands The Canary Islands (; ) or Canaries are an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean and the southernmost Autonomous communities of Spain, Autonomous Community of Spain. They are located in the northwest of Africa, with the closest point to the cont ...

with them having similar admixture profiles, and being ancestral to today's North African populations. Geneticists who conducted these investigations concluded that: "We show that Early Neolithic Moroccans (c. ~5,000 BCE) are similar to Later Stone Age individuals from the same region and possess an endemic element retained in present-day Maghrebi populations, confirming a long-term genetic continuity in the region." Later research by Simões, Luciana G et al. 2023, showed KEB can be modelled as a mix of ancestries present in northwestern Africa during the Early and Middle Neolithic periods (7,400-6,000 ya). The newcomers from

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

and the

Levant The Levant ( ) is the subregion that borders the Eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Mediterranean sea to the west, and forms the core of West Asia and the political term, Middle East, ''Middle East''. In its narrowest sense, which is in use toda ...

brought new ways of life, farming practices, goat and sheep domestication and pottery traditions. These distinct genetic groups coexisted in close proximity, the local hunter-gatherers, farmers from Iberia, and Levantine pastoralists.

References

Sources

* {{coord missing, Morocco Archaeological sites in Morocco 4th-millennium BC establishments

Genetics

See also

References

Sources