oub002 23andme format High Quality

In 2023, a major ancient DNA study published in Nature sequenced the genome of an individual labeled OUB002, an Epipalaeolithic person from northwest Africa dating to about 7,660–7,506 years before present. I have retrieved her genome from the European Nucleotide Archive.

This sample comes from Maghreb, linking later Stone Age hunter-gatherers in Morocco to much earlier populations such as the Iberomaurusians from sites like Taforalt, showing continuity of a distinctive ancestral lineage in that region over thousands of years.

According to F4 statistics, this sample displays a strong eurasian shift relative to East Africans and an African shift relative to Upper Paleolithic Europeans.

qpAdm modeling suggests that she carried just under half West Eurasian–related ancestry, with the remainder made up of Basal Eurasian and Ancestral North African components, totaling roughly 59 percent. It’s important to clarify that this model does not measure Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Instead, it captures ancestry from deeply diverged, low-Neanderthal populations, for which Dinka is used only as a proxy.

She can also be modeled as 65 percent Dzudzuana with an additional 35 percent Ancestral North African. Estimating the true proportion of Sub-Saharan African ancestry is more challenging, as it is largely absorbed into the Ancestral North African and Basal Eurasian components rather than appearing as a distinct signal.