Gibraltar Connection – 7/8/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

“I wonder what kind of people lived in Portugal and Spain in the old days, long ago, before the Romans, or the Carthaginians. Before everyone else. I wonder what the first man to see the western sea thought [o Atlântico].” This is what young Alboin Errol, a character in the novel “The Lost Road”, says to himself. It is one of the many works that JRR Tolkien (1892-1973), author of “The Lord of the Rings”, started and he didn’t finish writing before publishing his bestseller.

Like the British writer, Alboin is obsessed with ancient languages ​​and archaeology, with what he calls “the desire to go back”—to the deep past, of course; who in their right mind would want to travel to the future when they can go back thousands of years in time? (Sorry, that’s me speaking, but I think it represents Tolkien well.)

The manuscript of “The Lost Road” dates from the late 1930s, which means that Alboin Errol/Tolkien had no idea of ​​the future rise of a business called archaeogenetics — the ability to analyze the DNA of people who have been dead for millennia. (Incidentally, not even the role of DNA in the process of heredity was known at the time. As you can see, it was another world.) Despite the author’s phobia – often justified – to technological advancement, it is quite possible that he was fascinated with what a new genomic study has revealed just about the crossroads of the Atlantic that he mentions in the above passage — at a time long, long before the Romans and Carthaginians.

The research in question came out recently in the scientific journal Nature and, in fact, it mainly covers the connection between the Iberian peninsula and the African territory adjacent to it, on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, in present-day Morocco. DNA data help map what happened in this stretch of North Africa between 7,500 years and 6,000 years ago, when people there were going through the so-called Neolithic transition — that is, they abandoned hunting and gathering to dedicate themselves to planting and animal husbandry.

If the region today is marked by the migratory flow from Africa to Europe, the situation in the Neolithic was exactly the opposite. Analysis of the DNA of nine individuals from the Moroccan Neolithic period shows that an ancient North African population (rooted there since at least 15,000 years before the present) was mixing with a migratory wave linked to the peoples who then inhabited the Iberian lands.

The scenario, however, is even more complicated than the previous paragraph suggests. The Nature study, led by Cristina Valdiosera, from the University of Burgos, in Spain, and Mattias Jakobsson, from the University of Uppsala, in Sweden, indicates that the Iberian newcomers were, in turn, mostly descendants of other immigrants, from Anatolian origin (that is, coming from present-day Turkey and surroundings).

This group from the Iberian peninsula seems to have brought with them the cultivation of cereals such as barley, as well as the raising of cattle — but not always. Some natives of North Africa independently adopted this Neolithic agropastoral package, but without interbreeding with the newcomers, probably due to cultural diffusion of planting and herding techniques.

Opera summary: Many Neolithic Moroccans were, genetically, something like 20% North African, 70% Anatolian, and 10% European hunter-gatherers. And this mixture would still be complemented by more waves of people from the Middle East towards the end of the period.

Between us, this type of information, increasingly abundant, sheds a completely different light on the ethnic history of our species. We have always been nomads and mestizos. And that can be an encouraging thought.

PS – The translation of the excerpt from “A Estrada Perdida” quoted at the beginning of the column is by Gabriel Oliva Brum.

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