The Oldest Mummies On Earth Have DNA That Doesn't Match Any Living Human

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In southwestern Libya, two naturally mummified women were found in the Takarkori rock shelter — seven thousand years old, among the oldest mummies ever discovered. When a team led by Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute sequenced their full genomes, the results defied every expectation. These women belonged to a previously unknown branch of the human family tree — a "ghost population" that split from sub-Saharan Africans around fifty thousand years ago, then remained genetically isolated for tens of thousands of years through one of the most dynamic periods of human migration on Earth. Their lineage connects to the ancient Taforalt Cave foragers of Morocco but has no direct match in any living population today. They carried barely any Neanderthal DNA and showed no genetic trace of the farming and herding revolutions happening around them — suggesting that pastoralism in the Green Sahara spread through cultural exchange, not migration. Where this lineage survived between fifty thousand and fifteen thousand years ago — when the Sahara was still desert — remains a complete mystery.Meanwhile, the Chinchorro people of Chile created the world's oldest artificial mummies — seventy-four hundred years old, two thousand years before Egypt. And the Spirit Cave Mummy from Nevada, the oldest natural mummy on Earth at ten thousand six hundred years, carried an unexplained Australasian genetic signal found in ancient South Americans but completely absent from North America — a puzzle that still has no answer.🔔 Subscribe for more stories where DNA rewrites everything.📚 SOURCES:• Salem, N. et al. — "Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara Reveals Ancestral North African Lineage," Nature (2025)• Moreno-Mayar, J.V. et al. — "Early Human Dispersals Within the Americas," Science (2018)• Arriaza, B. — "Beyond Death: The Chinchorro Mummies of Ancient Chile," Smithsonian Institution Press• Willerslev, E. et al. — University of Cambridge / University of Copenhagen, Spirit Cave & Lagoa Santa DNA Studies, Science (2018)• BBC Science Focus — "This 7,000-Year-Old Mummy DNA Has Revealed a 'Ghost' Branch of Humanity" (2025)#Mummies #AncientDNA #GhostPopulation #Takarkori #Chinchorro #SpiritCave #Genetics #HumanOrigins #GreenSahara #Archaeology #ForgottenHistory