Mauretania

Last night I caught wind of this genetic article on the Maghreb. Three populations merged to create the Mauretania as of the Punic era.

Mauretania rolled off the LGM / Upper Palaeolithic as the usual dirty bunch of foragers, culturally not so far off those "WHG" in Iberia whence they came. But these foragers never resumed mutual contact, after the warming. About 5500 BC, Early Neolithic peoples (not just practices) came in from Europe; which peoples had originally, themselves, migrated from the Levant. Some mixed with the locals and others didn't, although the latter happily accepted Neolithic practices. We're about at the onset of ceramics, maybe even goldworking.

Middle Neolithic occasioned another influx. This one was from the "east" more-directly. The paper thinks pastoralists; I'll say early "Berber" groups, like Kabylie / Canary / Zenaga. Still not any sort of camel tho'. Razib is questioning if the Sahara was insurmountable. But this is green-Sahara time. West-Africa might not be reachable but I do wonder about Fezzan and Chad.

We haven't got into that Punic era; for that, see here. The Canaanis and the Romans, concomitant with the introduction of the camel and the rise and fall of that Garamantian kingdom, upended Africa at the most basic level. So what we see as "Imazighen" today is mostly a late-antique phenomenon.

Zenaga and Kabylie are about all that's left of the older strata, of Middle-Neolithic pastorals. I doubt we have anything left of the non-Tamazight either native or from Iberia (possible those last survivors swarmed back into Tartessus).