Farming wasn’t a wholesale success when it arrived in North Africa
About 12,000 years ago, people in a dusty corner of Anatolia started the agricultural revolution. Their descendants soon spread west across Europe, bringing with them herds of animals, domesticated crops, and pottery—a shift in lifestyle archaeologists call the Neolithic transition. Over the course of several thousand years, these agrarian standard bearers absorbed, and then mostly replaced, the hunter-gatherers who had occupied Europe since the end of the last ice age. New DNA results published today in Nature show hunter-gatherers in North Africa somehow flipped that script . In the long stretch of coast between modern-day Egypt and Morocco, known as the eastern Maghreb, the preexisting local hunter-gatherer ancestry remained dominant even after immigrant farmers arrived and...