Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Iberomaurusian" in English language version.
However, a preprint from Lazaridis et al. (2018) has contested this conclusion based on new evidence from Paleolithic samples from the Dzudzuana site in Georgia (25,000 years BCE). When these samples are considered in the analysis, Taforalt can be better modeled as a mixture of a Dzudzuana component and a sub-Saharan African component. They also argue that it is the Taforalt people who contributed to the genetic composition of Natufians and not the other way around. More evidence will be needed to determine the specific origin of the North African Upper Paleolithic populations, but the presence of an ancestral U6 lineage in the Dzudzuana people is consistent with this population being related to the back migration to Africa.
the complex sub-Saharan ancestry in Taforalt makes our individuals an unlikely proxy for the ancestral population of later Natufians who do not harbor sub-Saharan ancestry. An epicenter in the Maghreb is plausible only if the sub-Saharan African admixture into Taforalt either postdated the expansion into the Levant or was a locally confined phenomenon.
Moreover, our model predicts that West Africans (represented by Yoruba) had 12.5±1.1% ancestry from a Taforalt related group rather than Taforalt having ancestry from an unknown Sub-Saharan African source; this may have mediated the limited Neanderthal admixture present in West Africans. An advantage of our model is that it allows for a local North African component in the ancestry of Taforalt, rather than deriving them exclusively from Levantine and Sub-Saharan sources. ... and Taforalt, can all be modeled as a mixture of Dzudzuana and additional 'Deep' ancestry that may represent an even earlier split than the Basal Eurasians.
"The prevailing notion has been that hunter-gatherers' diets were primarily composed of animal proteins. However, the evidence from Taforalt demonstrates that plants constituted a big part of the hunter-gatherers' menu," said Zineb Moubtahij, a doctoral student in archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution
the complex sub-Saharan ancestry in Taforalt makes our individuals an unlikely proxy for the ancestral population of later Natufians who do not harbor sub-Saharan ancestry. An epicenter in the Maghreb is plausible only if the sub-Saharan African admixture into Taforalt either postdated the expansion into the Levant or was a locally confined phenomenon.
the complex sub-Saharan ancestry in Taforalt makes our individuals an unlikely proxy for the ancestral population of later Natufians who do not harbor sub-Saharan ancestry. An epicenter in the Maghreb is plausible only if the sub-Saharan African admixture into Taforalt either postdated the expansion into the Levant or was a locally confined phenomenon.