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The Imazighen or Berbers of North Africa reached the region more than 20,000 years ago, while the Arabs are more recent migrants, reaching in the seventh century Common Era, new research has confirmed.
Scientists David Comas and Òscar Lao from the Barcelona-based Institute of Evolutionary Biology — a joint centre of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) — used Artificial Intelligence to reveal that the Arabs and the Imazighen separated more than 20,000 years ago.
The team conducted a comprehensive analysis of 364 complete genomes from different populations.
To do so, it developed an innovative computational model with natural computing methods, within the field of artificial intelligence, dubbed “genetic programming for population genetics” (GP4PG).
“The new GP4PG model has allowed a more precise, robust and refined analysis, which for the first time clearly separates the two peoples more than 20,000 years ago, when the Imazighen returned to Africa from Eurasia in the movement known as ‘back to Africa’,” Lao was quoted as saying in a statement by UPF.
According to previous studies, the Arabs of North Africa originated in the Neolithic Period. However, research has confirmed that the Arabs instead colonised North Africa during the seventh century CE.
That is when Egypt, then a province of the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire fell to Amr ibn al-As, a Sahabah or Companion of the Prophet Muhammad and Arab commander, who later ruled Egypt as governor of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphs.
The Arab conquest of Egypt, which had been ruled by indigenous Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, led to the ‘Arabisation’ of the country, as Arab Muslim settlers colonised it, later spreading to Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco with the Muslim Conquest of the region known as the Maghreb (‘West’ in Arabic).
“With the GP4PG model we can observe that the arrival of the Arab people around 600 AD generated a gradual genetic gradient that declines from east to west, from the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa,” Óscar Lao said.
Modelling the demographic history of human North African genomes points to a recent soft split divergence between populations was published in the journal Genome Biology.