The Sahara Desert has not always been the arid, inhospitable landscape we know today. Between 14,500 and 5,000 years ago, the area was unrecognizable, transformed into a lush savannah by an unusually wet interval called the African Humid Period. People roamed this green landscape for thousands of years before it was again lost to sand. Ancient DNA extracted from two women who died in what is now Libya around 7,000 years ago is now helping researchers to reconstruct the origins of these early Saharans. The women's DNA profiles, described in a study published on 2 April in Nature1, represent the first full Saharan genomes from the African Humid Period ' and reveal that the people were remarkably isolated from other African populations. 'The prehistory of North Africa is a big puzzle, and we only have a few pieces available,' says Rosa Fregel, a geneticist at the University of La Laguna in San Cristobal, Spain, who was not involved in the research. The work is 'a significant...
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